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Claudia EgererAssociate Professor (Docent)

About me

With my theoretical and intellectual background in post structuralism and my interest in issues of border-crossings, my teaching and writing has explored questions of otherness, marginality, silence, and the nonhuman. I am a co-founder of the Environmental Humanities Network at Stockholm University and I run the new research school theme in Environmental Humanities at Stockholm University in collaboration with environmental humanities-colleagues Christina Fredengren (Archeology) and Karin Dirke (History of Ideas), beginning in autumn 2018. My concerns with rethinking the place of the human and the humanities in times of climate change is explored in my teaching (the optional course “Ecopoetics” and MA course “Literary Limits”) and in my research (two book-length studies, working titles: Imaginings of Water: Storying Anthropocene Anxieties and Wolf Matters).

Since I received my doctorate in 1996 I have taught at the University of Trondheim/NTNU, have been visiting scholar at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and have now tenure at Stockholm University, where I served as deputy head July 2006 to July 2009, and as head of department July 2009 to July 2015.

“Have PhD, will travel.” Academia equals mobility for me, so in keeping with my family motto ‘boots not roots’ I am engaged in establishing exchanges with universities worldwide to encourage and facilitate mobility for students and staff. I initiated the English department’s faculty exchange with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which now includes graduate students. I spent the fall semester of 2011 in Madison teaching a graduate course in post humanism with focus on ‘the question of the animal.’ In 2012, I instigated the English department’s five-week-seminar series, with Carrol Clarkson from the University of Cape Town as our first guest; a seminar series that is still going strong.  In June 2014, I participated in the inaugural meeting of the Global Academy of Liberal Arts (GALA) at Bath Spa University. Our participation in GALA has so far resulted in the formation of the Transnational Creatives group and an international research collaboration around the theme of lost waters.

On a more personal note, I am convinced that a literary text is, to cite one of my favorite authors, J. M. Coetzee, not a way of making messages taste nice, it is an other mode of thinking. A closet poet myself, I have a special love of poetry, with John Donne, John Keats and Rainer Maria Rilke as all time favorites. In my spare time, I run, sail, and struggle with the challenge of training bird dogs.

Research projects

Environmental research in the Human Sciences area

The aim of this new initiative is to develop a strong collaborative network on environmental issues between the three faculties which make up the Human Sciences Area at Stockholm University: Humanities, Law and Social Sciences.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Insects, worlds, and the poetic in Coetzee's writing

    2016. Claudia Egerer. Textual Practice 30 (3), 493-508

    Article

    J. M. Coetzee's literary universe creates a space for creatures often thought so insignificant that they are mostly overlooked or, if noticed at all, discarded as useless pests. In his writing, we repeatedly experience moments of wonder when insects take centre-stage, touching characters and readers alike with awe at their power of transformation. These moments are like poetic epiphanies, flashes into worlds otherwise closed to human experience. But Coetzee's imagining of insects vis-à-vis his characters also challenges the way we think about the world in general and the environment in particular, not least our own role in it. Martin Heidegger is but one in a long line of philosophers at pains to reinforce the boundary drawn between human and animal, arguing that the animal, unlike the human, only has limited access to its surroundings. Yet it is also Heidegger who is early in his recognition of the repercussions of human arrogance on the environment. Zoologist Jakob von Uexküll's research into insect worlds challenges the understanding that the human has access to the world in its entirety, stressing the relational aspect that all living beings have with their surroundings, their Umwelt, the human animal included. Agamben brings to this the idea that all animals, even insects, experience a certain openness within their environment, a capacity that Heidegger granted only to the human. This diversity of environmental worlds shaped by species-specific needs and abilities suggests that humans are subject to the same mechanisms that limit access to the Umwelt of other creatures, from which follows that any attempt to know another being's Umwelt would involve a venture into territory which requires different and novel ways of seeing. Literature is the space which invites us into unknowable worlds and supplies us with the tongue to touch on the not-yet-formulated. Coetzee's poetic imagination draws our attention to what I would like to describe as an extraordinary rapport between insects and the poetic in his texts, both marked by being at once recognisable yet infinitely other, providing us with rare glimpses into unknowable worlds and our own implication in them.

    Read more about Insects, worlds, and the poetic in Coetzee's writing

  • Tracing a Poetics of Animacy in J. M. Coetzee

    2014. Claudia Egerer.

    Conference

    “Tracing a Poetics of Animacy”

    In this talk I’m interested to follow a certain trajectory in Coetzee’s oeuvre that appears to run counter to a writing typically marked by its linguistic precision and economy. This trajectory explores intimations of another kind, alluding to an affective realm that does not lend itself easily to expression in words, indeed, appears to be beyond the confines of language entirely. In Foe, one of the endings takes the reader to “the home of Friday... where bodies are their own signs” (157). Discussing
Ted Hughes’ “The Jaguar” Elizabeth Costello notes that we do not so much think our way into making sense of the jaguar
as feel “the body... as it moves... [we] inhabit that body” (51). In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate is caught off guard by his difficulty in shooting a waterbuck and despite his attempts to “shrug off this irritating and uncanny feeling” (40) he remains oddly sensitive to the ways humans “crush insects beneath [their] feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants” (107).

    These moments of intuition are marked by an intense sensation of shared embodiedness and ensouledness, of a creaturely fullness of being, an existence beyond language where animality constitutes an experiential realm in need of a tongue that knows how to touch without defining and circumscribing. I will trace instances in Coetzee’s texts where what I would like to call a poetics of animacy accentuates instances of muteness, of intensities, of the ability to move and being moved. This poetics of animacy creates a productive tension between what is said and what cannot be said yet finds expression in the intuition of an intense perception of what it means to be a living soul.

    Read more about Tracing a Poetics of Animacy in J. M. Coetzee

  • (Re-)Contextualizing Literary and Cultural History

    2013. .

    Book (ed)

    This volume holds a number of contributions from a conference held at Stockholm University 2–4 September, 2010: (Re)ContextualizingLiterary and Cultural History. The aim of the conference was to gather scholars from a variety of disciplines, not only to investigate material or literary history and culture but also to bring theoretical aspects from different elds of research into play. The conference thus brought together scholars to (re-)examine the importance of historical perspectives in literary studies, and to scrutinize the impact of cultural studies on early modern scholarship. A selection of revised papers was chosen for publication in this volume. It is divided into three parts: I Theorizing Literary and Cultural History II Ordering Thoughts—Making Sense of the World, and III Communicating Things and Thoughts.

    Read more about (Re-)Contextualizing Literary and Cultural History

  • Nothing Matters

    2004. Claudia Egerer. Journal for Cultural Research: Special Issue: Zero and Literature 8 (2), 157-165

    Article

    This essay reads Miller reading literature and zero, zero in literature, tracing how a doubling at the heart of zero is echoed in Miller's work. Miller's fascination and engagement with literature as otherness invokes the ambiguity of the sign O, sharing its figure with a figure that isn't a figure, impossibly at once letter and numeral, now converging in Miller's text on zero in literature. Literature, like zero, like the lover, like the Other, incessantly invites analysis only to elude understanding. Nothing matters because it is a place of slippage, playfully unsettling our most deeply ingrained beliefs.

    Read more about Nothing Matters

  • Fictons of (In)Betweenness

    1997. Claudia Egerer.

    Thesis (Doc)

    The study investigates how both fictional and theoretical texts engage in 'worrying the lines' between conceptions of home and exile. It analyzes the ways in which home and exile are problematized in novels by Louise Erdrich, J M Coetzee, and David Malouf, to bring them in contact and collision with similar reconceptualizations in the writings of Homi K. Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said.

    The texts discussed are seen as participating in the rethinking of such issues as center/margin and self/other that we have come to associate with theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism. These texts position themselves as texts of (in)betweenness in that they are engaged in thinking the between f (binary) oppositions. In their attempt to think against and across categories, articulations of (in)betweenness cannot be fixed in either a postmodern or postcolonial space. Rather, (in)betweenness is a mode of thinking that is dependent on what is called a postcolonial awareness.

    Read more about Fictons of (In)Betweenness

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