Svend Erik Larsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 200281 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Svend Erik Larsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Svend Erik |
| FAMILY NAME | Larsen |
| SIGNATURE | LARSEN S E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6748-8029 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Global Mapping or Transcultural Exchange
Most literary histories with a global ambition attempt to map the world, often tilted toward a European/Western perspective and written as a teamwork by individual experts on a variety of regions – and maybe originating from those regions – each of them taking responsibility for their own linguistic and regional specialty. Often, the regional or local chapters offer few new insights for readers from that region, but useful insights for people fro…
Between the Media: Media Relations in Literature and Art
Most discussions on mediality and intermediality take their point of departure as contemporary digital media, social media included. Hence, earlier periods in cultural history are often regarded as simple forerunners for the highly complex situation in today’s globalized media culture based on digital technologies. It is true that electronic media technology and its social effects now have reached an unprecedented and accelerated technological co…
Narratives as cultural embedment
All cultures produce stories; all humans are storytellers. Hence, by implication, narratives must serve a fundamental cultural and existential function in human life. This article suggests the term “cultural embedment” to characterize this function. This article points out that, for narratives to play the role as a tool for cultural embedment, the double structure of narratives always switches back and forth between an object level and a meta lev…
Stunde Null: Naming and Re-naming
Stunde Null – this expression is used to indicate the end of the German Nazi regime in 1945 and the beginning of a new Germany. This historical turning point was marked by the re-naming of the former Germany in both East and West, and Nazi symbols, institutions, values and paraphernalia were taken to the tip. Naming and re-naming were part of this iconoclastic attempt to undo a recent past by turning the memory of it into a negative memory soon t…
Literature as an experience of globalisation: An interview with Svend Erik Larsen
Svend Erik Larsen is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark, and a member of Academia Europaea. He has authored more than 10 books and 400 articles. His latest works include journal articles, ‘Australia between White Australia and Multiculturalism: A World Literature Perspective’ (2017), ‘Migration and Translation in a World Literature Perspective’ (2017), ‘World Literature in an Extended Media Landscape’ (2017…
Literature in its Media Context
Literature consists of works of language, but it has never been able to function as literature without being part of a cluster of interconnected media. From time immemorial, oratures require performances to work and thus cannot exist without use of bodily signs or use of various tools and instruments. Today, of course, this extended media landscape is vaster and more complex and distributed through more differentiated and numerous agencies than e…
Educational Transitions – A Challenge to Research, Practice and Policy
In the wake of the Second World War, the demand for an expansion of higher education grew dramatically, first in Europe and the USA and later across the globe, and increasingly so in the twenty-first century. This situation changed the relation between the steps making up the ladder of the various national educational systems in particular, from academically oriented secondary education to research-based higher education, a vital transition that …
Walter Cohen, A History of European Literature: The West and the World from Antiquity to the Present
A Post-imperial Stress Syndrome or a New Beginning
Within written history, Europe is rich in post-imperial situations. In the twentieth century the dwindling empires of this century, born during European colonial expansion after Columbus, gave rise to new post-imperial conditions with a global impact. Europe is no exception. On other continents, empires have also emerged and faded away: Latin-America with the Mayas and the Aztecs, and, notably, Asia where the Chinese Empire has disappeared and re…
Interdisciplinarity, History and Cultural Encounters
Interdisciplinarity has entered the agenda of researchers, teachers and policy makers and will remain there in the future. This does not mean that interdisciplinarity is understood the same way, let alone is appreciated everywhere. Researchers are challenged by increasingly complex problems in culture, nature and society beyond disciplinary boundaries; higher education has to cater to a volatile job market where known disciplines no longer define…
Memory, Migration and Literature
More often than not, memory is taken to be the storehouse of past experiences situated in a local context. However, recent theories have moved the focus to the process of memory which, in any present moment, allows the past, collective or individual, to emerge as a construction that works as a strong driving force of identity formation. In this perspective the memory process selects features of the past and turns them into more or less coherent s…
No Future without Humanities: Literary Perspectives
What might Humanities have to offer to the current big societal and technological challenges? The nine short position papers presented here were collected by Svend Erik Larsen from colleagues and members of the Academia Europaea Section for Literary and Theatrical Studies who have been actively involved in the changes within their discipline in the areas they introduce. They show emerging interdisciplinary fields, provide new insights, indicate s…
The body between intimacy and globalization
All humans share the condition of being bodily beings. This fact does not entail that all humans are identical across the globe, but that we share a global human condition for shaping a local and individual life, based on different conceptions of bodily based local and individual identities. But our bodies do not specify identities or offer a fixed number of options to choose between or to combine like morphological patterns in a language. The me…
From the National to a Transnational Paradigm. Writing Literary Histories Today
Modern literary history was born, together with the European nation states, in the early 19th century, encapsulating the emerging idea of literature as an articulation of the national mentality. In tandem with other national histories of art, politics, language, religion, culture and nature, literary history took part in the creation of a national identity, as did the literary texts it interpreted and canonized along a historical trajectory with …
Introduction to the Focus ‘Knowledge Management in Contemporary Europe’
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Introduction to the Special Section on Knowledge Management in Postmodern Society
This introductory essay contextualizes and meditates on the three articles—Bhattacharya, Day, and Waller—presented in this special section on “Knowledge Management in Postmodern Society.” In the process it reflects on following points: (1) the capacity the university had in the past to incorporate the irregular and its loss in the contemporary university, (2) the devaluation of humanities and social sciences because of the reduction of the narrat…
Euro-American Modernism as Local Refraction
Modernism and everything modern have always been identified with the avant-garde. If something had not at a certain juncture in cultural history been avant-garde, eo ipso it had also not been modern. But the history of literary Modernism shows a more complex picture. The various arrière-garde movements celebrating the regional, the traditional, the anti-urban aspects of life stood, on the one hand, in manifest contrast to the metropolitan and glo…
Hvordan er teksten i verden
Jørgen Bruhn: Romanens tænker – M.M. Bachtins romanteorier, Kbh.2005 (Multivers)
To See Things for the First Time: Before and After Ecocriticism
Ecocriticism has often been blamed to be too entangled with the literatures and the critical and political agendas of the Anglo-American world, and to be historically and aesthetically reductive inasmuch as its favourite texts are from the nineteenth and twentieth century dealing explicitly in motives, imagery and descriptions of the natural environment, more often than not in a troubled relationship with human activity. As human interaction with…
The Lisbon earthquake and the scientific turn in Kant's philosophy
In contrast to other previous and later disasters the Lisbon earthquake was more than a local disaster that changed the life of the Portuguese population and later became subject to the merciless oblivion of history. This cataclysm left lasting traces in European science, social life, religion and philosophy. The material effects were rapidly felt all over Europe, also affecting the economy and the whole conception of how humans should think and …
History: Changing the forms or forming the changes
Change in European cultural history has, for a long period, been discussed through two interrelated notions, that of science and that of history. This paper traces the various stages of this discussion from Antiquity to the present day from the point of view of history. Two reoccurring and paradigmatic characters of mythological descent, Odysseus and Prometheus, illustrate how history as a realm for human responsibility and future planning has es…
The national landscape – national identity or post-colonial experience
The paper sets out to analyse the mechanisms and functions of the national landscape as a cultural invention through literature, underscoring how literature, more than other media, most clearly articulates its conflictual complexity, being both descriptions of and reflections on identities. The national landscape is part of a more general story of how place and identity are interconnected. Through analyses of texts by Nadine Gordimer, John Michae…
Landscape, Identity, and War
This paper investigates the role of the landscape in relation to war as articulated in literature from antiquity to the present day. It is the same story as the story of identity creation, but looked upon from the reverse side. Being both the object of war as battlefield, and the subject of war as confirmation of identity, the landscape of war is not just a ruined and bare piece of destructed nature, but a complex imaginative and symbolic entity …
Nature between fact and fiction: A note on virtual reality
The paper places the trendy notion of virtuality and virtual reality in a conceptual and historical context that makes it useful in a semiotic perspective. Virtuality is connected with the classical notion of fictionality, in its meaning of both invention and deception. Historically an active, a passive, and a neutral version of the concept can be distinguished. The notion is reinterpreted as a variant of the semiotic processes of deixis. In rela…
Cultural borders and creation of culture
Cet article presente uen reflexion epistemologique sur la semiotique culturelle. Cette discipline propose de chercher comment les hommes construisent la realite et comment la bordure entre realite et culture est tracee en relation avec ce qui ne releve pas de ces champs. Le champ de la semiotique culturelle est l'interelation entre deux champs de recherche : 1) les limites de la culture en relation avec son fondement naturel, assiste par les syst…
To See Things for the First Time: Before and After Ecocriticism
Ecocriticism has often been blamed to be too entangled with the literatures and the critical and political agendas of the Anglo-American world, and to be historically and aesthetically reductive inasmuch as its favourite texts are from the nineteenth and twentieth century dealing explicitly in motives, imagery and descriptions of the natural environment, more often than not in a troubled relationship with human activity. As human interaction with…
The Lisbon earthquake and the scientific turn in Kant's philosophy
In contrast to other previous and later disasters the Lisbon earthquake was more than a local disaster that changed the life of the Portuguese population and later became subject to the merciless oblivion of history. This cataclysm left lasting traces in European science, social life, religion and philosophy. The material effects were rapidly felt all over Europe, also affecting the economy and the whole conception of how humans should think and …
Landscape, Identity, and War
This paper investigates the role of the landscape in relation to war as articulated in literature from antiquity to the present day. It is the same story as the story of identity creation, but looked upon from the reverse side. Being both the object of war as battlefield, and the subject of war as confirmation of identity, the landscape of war is not just a ruined and bare piece of destructed nature, but a complex imaginative and symbolic entity …
Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages
Is nature really natural
The paper argues that nature is basically cultural, but that nature does not occupy a fixed place in the human cultural universe. It may be a mental construct in the sciences or in the arts, an empirical aspect of working process or scientific investigation, a philosophical, religious or mythological presupposition for our existence, or part of a discursive rhetoric concerning socially coded naturalness. In each case, humans have been inextricabl…
Between the Media: Media Relations in Literature and Art
Most discussions on mediality and intermediality take their point of departure as contemporary digital media, social media included. Hence, earlier periods in cultural history are often regarded as simple forerunners for the highly complex situation in today’s globalized media culture based on digital technologies. It is true that electronic media technology and its social effects now have reached an unprecedented and accelerated technological co…
Interdisciplinarity, History and Cultural Encounters
Interdisciplinarity has entered the agenda of researchers, teachers and policy makers and will remain there in the future. This does not mean that interdisciplinarity is understood the same way, let alone is appreciated everywhere. Researchers are challenged by increasingly complex problems in culture, nature and society beyond disciplinary boundaries; higher education has to cater to a volatile job market where known disciplines no longer define…
Memory, Migration and Literature
More often than not, memory is taken to be the storehouse of past experiences situated in a local context. However, recent theories have moved the focus to the process of memory which, in any present moment, allows the past, collective or individual, to emerge as a construction that works as a strong driving force of identity formation. In this perspective the memory process selects features of the past and turns them into more or less coherent s…
Benjamin: A Literary Critic
New Literary History - Volume 29, Number 1, Winter 1998
Handbuch der semiotik
Introduction. Viggo Brøndal (1887-1942), linguiste, philosophe, sémioticien
Larsen Svend Erik, Laffitte Maryse. Introduction. Viggo Brøndal (1887-1942), linguiste, philosophe, sémioticien. In: Langages, 22e année, n°86, 1987. A l'occasion d'un centenaire : Actualité de Brøndal. pp. 7-12.
A semiotic meeting in the square
A semiotic meeting in the square
Les maillons du langage: La sémantique rationnelle de Brondal : « Théorie des prépositions
Larsen Svend Erik, Laffitte Maryse. Les maillons du langage. In: Langages, 22e année, n°86, 1987. A l'occasion d'un centenaire : Actualité de Brøndal. pp. 95-110
Gods, ghosts, and objects: Brøndal and Peirce
Handbuch der semiotik
Un essai de sémiotique transatlantique: La notion d'objet chez Brondal, Peirce et Greimas
Larsen Svend Erik. Un essai de sémiotique transatlantique : la notion d'objet chez Brondal, Peirce et Greimas. In: Langages, 25e année, n°103, 1991. L'objet sens et réalité, sous la direction de Jean-Claude Coquet et Jean Petitot. pp. 7-22
Urban indices
Forskel og lighed
Frans Gregersen: Sociolingvistikkens (u)mulighed: Videnskabshistoriske studier i Ferdinand Saussures og Louis Hjelmslevs strukturalistiske sprogteorier I-II
Simmel mod Simmel
Nils Gunder Hansen: Sansernes sociologi. Om Georg Simmel og det moderne
Saussure: Signs, systems and arbitrariness
Is nature really natural
The paper argues that nature is basically cultural, but that nature does not occupy a fixed place in the human cultural universe. It may be a mental construct in the sciences or in the arts, an empirical aspect of working process or scientific investigation, a philosophical, religious or mythological presupposition for our existence, or part of a discursive rhetoric concerning socially coded naturalness. In each case, humans have been inextricabl…
Patriarchal hierarchies: Notes on Hjelmslev
L'A. veut mettre en evidence les presupposes et les limites fonctionnelles des strategies hierarchiques de Hjelmslev
Nature On the Move: Meanings of Nature in Contemporary Culture
Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages
Interpreting nature. Cultural constructions of the environment
Landscape, identity and literature
The article discusses the landscape as initially being part and parcel of God's creation, and also territory within boundaries defined by law. This subsequently led to the development of a national identity firmly rooted in the soil. The author regards the functions of the national landscape as providing a common unity to people and place, promoting their common origin, and finally naturalizing both unity and origin. Special reference is made to …
Benjamin: A Literary Critic
New Literary History - Volume 29, Number 1, Winter 1998
Nature now and then
Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. Edited by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998) vii + 342 pp. $55.00 cloth, $15.25 paper. Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction. By David Pepper (London: Routledge, 1996) viii +376 pp. £40 cloth, £13.99 paper
Cultural borders and creation of culture
Cet article presente uen reflexion epistemologique sur la semiotique culturelle. Cette discipline propose de chercher comment les hommes construisent la realite et comment la bordure entre realite et culture est tracee en relation avec ce qui ne releve pas de ces champs. Le champ de la semiotique culturelle est l'interelation entre deux champs de recherche : 1) les limites de la culture en relation avec son fondement naturel, assiste par les syst…
Nature between fact and fiction: A note on virtual reality
The paper places the trendy notion of virtuality and virtual reality in a conceptual and historical context that makes it useful in a semiotic perspective. Virtuality is connected with the classical notion of fictionality, in its meaning of both invention and deception. Historically an active, a passive, and a neutral version of the concept can be distinguished. The notion is reinterpreted as a variant of the semiotic processes of deixis. In rela…
Landscape, Identity, and War
This paper investigates the role of the landscape in relation to war as articulated in literature from antiquity to the present day. It is the same story as the story of identity creation, but looked upon from the reverse side. Being both the object of war as battlefield, and the subject of war as confirmation of identity, the landscape of war is not just a ruined and bare piece of destructed nature, but a complex imaginative and symbolic entity …
History: Changing the forms or forming the changes
Change in European cultural history has, for a long period, been discussed through two interrelated notions, that of science and that of history. This paper traces the various stages of this discussion from Antiquity to the present day from the point of view of history. Two reoccurring and paradigmatic characters of mythological descent, Odysseus and Prometheus, illustrate how history as a realm for human responsibility and future planning has es…
The national landscape – national identity or post-colonial experience
The paper sets out to analyse the mechanisms and functions of the national landscape as a cultural invention through literature, underscoring how literature, more than other media, most clearly articulates its conflictual complexity, being both descriptions of and reflections on identities. The national landscape is part of a more general story of how place and identity are interconnected. Through analyses of texts by Nadine Gordimer, John Michae…
The Lisbon earthquake and the scientific turn in Kant's philosophy
In contrast to other previous and later disasters the Lisbon earthquake was more than a local disaster that changed the life of the Portuguese population and later became subject to the merciless oblivion of history. This cataclysm left lasting traces in European science, social life, religion and philosophy. The material effects were rapidly felt all over Europe, also affecting the economy and the whole conception of how humans should think and …
Philosophy (30 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Art (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · History (10 works) · Psychology (10 works)