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Carin FranzénProfessor

About me

I am Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics since 2020 and former Professor of Language and Culture at Linköping University.

In my research I investigate the history of subjectivity in premodern as well as modern and contemporary European literature. My theoretical frame is informed by among others, psychoanalytic criticism, gender studies and discourse theory.

Research

A central aspect of my research deals with formations of subjectivity in literary history. I have published on medieval and early modern female writers’ appropriations of subject positions in the tradition of courtly love, e.g. Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre. See “The Division of Love and Feminine Desire”, Pangs of Love and Longing. Configuration of Desire in Premodern Literature, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2013, ”Christine de Pizan’s Appropriation of the Courtly Tradition”, Narrations genrées. Ecrivaines dans l'histoire européenne jusqu'au début du XXe siècle, Peeters Publishers 2014, and ”Polyphony of Love in the Heptaméron”, Allusions and Reflections. Greek and Roman Mythology in Renaissance Europe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2015.

I have also written about moralist and libertine ideas of passions and the art of existence in the writings of La Rochefoucauld, La Fontaine, Saint-Évremond and Ninon de Lenclos. See ”Love and desire in French moralist discourse”, Framing Premodern Desires. Sexual Ideas, Attitudes, and Practices in Europe, Amsterdam Univerisity Press 2017 and “Subjects of Sovereign Control and the Art of Critique in the Early Modern Period”, Control Culture: Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline, Edinburgh University Press 2018.

My current project

I two current projects I continue to address the history of subjectivity through an exploration of libertinism and freethinking in French literature 1500–1700. The purpose is to highlight the diversity of early modern subjectivity and to give new historical insight on present critical discussions concerning the modern subject within posthumanism, ecological humanities and new materialism. See En annan humanism and Freethinking, Hesitation, Weirdness: Reconsidering the Anthropocene through History, Literature, and Art.

Research projects

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

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