Cand. Philol. Sigfrid Kjeldaas disputerer for ph.d. -graden i humaniora og samfunnsvitenskap, studieretning litteratur og kultur, og vil offentlig forsvare avhandlingen:
«Nature Writing as Contact Zone: Western and Inuit Perspectives on Landscape and Animals in Barry Lopez´s Arctic Dreams»
Prøveforelesning starter kl. 10.15 samme dag og sted.
Kort sammendrag av avhandlingen:
This dissertation investigates Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986) from an arctic perspective, and with a view to how it presents arctic landscapes and animals. It reads Lopez’s text in the traditions of North American nature writing and arctic exploration literature, and looks at how scientific and Romantic ideas and representations of the region meet in this text. My claim is that if we read Arctic Dreams in terms of a contact zone in which these perspectives engage in creative dialogue with each other and with Inuit perspectives on the natural environment, new aspects of this classic text emerge, along with new visions of the Arctic. Lopez’s Arctic becomes a lively and social space in which animals and humans coexist within all-encompassing relationship networks that bridge the worlds of nature and culture. In Arctic Dreams Lopez combines scientific information with Romantic aesthetics in order to evoke this more social and material understanding of arctic landscapes, while at the same time exposing to us the values and limitations of these two different forms of representation. As if in consequence of these reflections, Lopez’s text reworks the nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic of the arctic natural sublime into a twentieth-century ecological sublime. This reworking reflects the environmental thrust of Arctic Dreams, which throughout its sustained reflections on the Arctic challenges Western culture’s instrumental and reductive perspectives on animals in particular and the natural world in general.
Veiledere:
Hovedveileder professor Johan Schimanski, UiO
Biveileder professor Fredrik C. Brøgger, Inst. for språk og kultur, UiT Norges arktiske universitet i Tromsø
Bedømmelseskomité:
Professor James Perrin Warren, Washington and Lee University, USA (førsteopponent)
Professor Dr. Hanna Eglinger, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Tyskland, (andreopponent)
Professor Henning Howlid Wærp, UiT Norges arktiske universitet i Tromsø (leder av komiteen)
Disputasleder:
førsteamanuensis Linda Nesby, institutt for språk og kultur, UiT Norges arktiske universitet i Tromsø