The text I wrote for Stanley Cavell’s memorial conference in 2018 is available online, on the website of Australia’s ABC Religion & Ethics.
Remembering Stanley Cavell
Real Characters
This piece was published in The Point Magazine in January 2020. It shows how modern academic literary criticism came to accept as dogmatic the the idea that one must not treat characters as if they were real. It also shows that this taboo prevents us from understanding what is going on in the recent “existential turn”: writing in which characters are supposed to come across as real, ranging from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle books to Elena Ferrante’s intensely psychological and historical Naples quartet. The essay is based on and continues work I did in Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies co-written with Rita Felski and Amanda Anderson (Chicago, 2019).
The Grammar of Passion: Vigdis Hjorth and Annie Ernaux
This is a brief text I wrote in Norwegian for a book celebrating Vigdis Hjorth’s 60th birthday in 2019. Contributors were asked to answer one question: “Do you, who have read Vigdis Hjorth’s books, believe that love will be possible again for the author?”
