Karin Kukkonen: "Literary Games, Poetics and Storyworlds of the Early-Modern Novel"

Research presentation by Karin Kukkonen, University of Oslo.

Abstract:
In the salons of seventeenth-century France, novelists played literary games, improvising narration, finding new rhymes for well-known sonnets or imagining an exchange of letters. A playful approach to literature was more than just a metaphor for these novelists. Rather, I propose, they used literary games to explore what the novel could be at this early point in the genre’s development. In this talk, I will discuss Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force’s Les jeux d’esprit (1701) in terms of a proto-poetics for the novel. La Force was well-known as a best-selling author of historical novels in her day, but she is also one of the pioneers of the fairy tale. Literary games, I suggest, enable what Kendall Walton calls «games of make-belief» and provide the basis for La Force’s reflections around history, fiction and the creation of fictional worlds.

The seminar will be followed by a reception in room 6-0015 (the lunchroom). We will take this opportunity to briefly present and celebrate two new publications: Ingela Nilsson’s Swedish translation of the ancient Greek novel Leucippe & Clitophon (2024) and Ellen Söderblom Saarela’s Can an object love? A philological essay on female subjectivity (2023).