Christian Refsum

Christian Refsum is a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. He has published Kjærlighet som religion [Love as Religion. Passion and Longing in the Film and Literature of the 2000s] in 2016 and co-edited Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community in 2019. He is currently working on the aesthetics and politics of friendship in the contemporary European novel. 

The project

Title: Friendship in the Contemporary European Novel

"The project investigates how friendship is described and explored in contemporary European literature, especially in English, French, and Scandinavian novels. Certain tendencies in late capitalism have actualized the role of friendship: Liquid modernity, individualism, digital technology (reorganizing the social), a general increase in single households. Such tendencies lead to the actualization of friendship as a path to seeking new ways of living together, of loyalty and security. A main hypothesis for the project is that the contemporary novel in various ways responds to this situation by exploring the conditions for why and how people establish and maintain emotional bonds, and for why they become isolated and lonely. What are the grounds of friendship? How do various models for organizing schools, labor, and leisure activities contribute to facilitating (or working against) various forms of friendship? What kinds of relationships are facilitated on digital platforms?How do various working conditions (e.g. related to new public management) influence personal relationships? What can the contemporary novel tell us about such questions? The project is both concerned with contemporary novels, and with more theoretical attempts at discussing motivations and grounds of friendship in a social and political context. Some of the most important French speaking writers in my research corpus includes: M. Blanchot, J. Derrida, D. Diop, A. Ernaux, V. Despentes and É. Louis."

Hosting institution: Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle

Selective Bibliography

• "Scandinavian Oversharing? Hans Jæger, Agnar Mykle and Karl Ove Knausgaard”, in Neumann, Iver B. (Eds.), Knausgaard in Context. Universitetsforlaget, 2025
• “Event: Or, How Foucault Used Baudelaire to Enlighten Kant”, in Grøtta, Marit & Barnhart, Bruce Evan (Ed.), Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature. Routledge, 2023, p. 15–30
• “The crisis of love in Michel Houellebecq’s Sérotonine”, in Orbis Litterarum. ISSN 0105-7510. 77(6), 2022, p. 355–370.
• "’A love relationship is not a place for refuge, it is the place to be’": The Theme of Love in Karl Ove Knausgård's Min kamp”, in Scandinavian Studies. ISSN 0036-5637. 92(3), p. 369–389.
• “Love, Longing, and the Smartphone: Lena Andersson, Vigdis Hjorth, and Hanne Ørstavik”, In Malmio, Kristina & Kurikka, Kaisa (Ed.), Contemporary Nordic Literature and Spatiality. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, p. 103–120.