Knut Ove ELIASSEN

Knut Ove Eliassen studied in Norway, Denmark and France. He was maître de conférence in philosophy at University Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris 1 (1986), Cand. Philology & History of Ideas, Univercity of Oslo (1997), Dr. Philosophie, University of Trondheim, Norway (1994). Professor in comparative literature, NTNU, Trondheim (2000). Since 2015 he is in charge of a national research school in aesthetics and literary studies, "Text, Image, Space, Sound". He is a member of several editorial boards, including Foucault Studies.

The project

Title: Maritime modernities. Aesthetic negotiations of the modern shoreline of the North Atlantic and its cultures. 

The epistemologies and media ecologies of maritime literature. Literature and geography. Enlightenment studies. Contemporary French philosophy.

Beaches are the order of the day, ecologically, politically, and economically. Due to the present transformation of the world’s shorelines, they are massively present in contemporary critical ecological discourse, in particular, the blue humanities. Once predominantly workplaces and sources of livelihood for a large variety of cultures, the Atlantic coastline is increasingly remade into spaces for leisure and holiday destinations. Yet, and more ominously, beaches have become the scenes of the waste deposits of industrial production, spanning from chemical pollution and oil spills to derelict plastic fishing tools and the flotsam maritime transportation.
This project explores the cultural history of the Atlantic shoreline from a specifically North European perspective and investigates the competing discourses on the beach, legal as well as literary, that inform the policymaking and the horizon of action and intervention. Its point of departure is how the Anthropocene has made apparent the complexity of beaches as nature-culture-hybrids, where biotopes, economic interests and cultural practices meet, intersect, and blend. Drawing on twentieth-century literary theories of topology (E.R. Curtius, R. Barthes etc.) this project aims to map the tropes and figures of thought that inform the competing conceptions of the beach, and how they have an immediate bearing on the way we organize our lives.

The project is an integral part of the larger project “Thinking Blue. Passages between the Arts and the Sciences in Nordic Environments”, instigated by prof. Sylvain Briens, School of Humanities of the Sorbonne, prof. Frederik Tygstrup, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University. [...]

Hosting institution: Sorbonne Université, faculté des Lettres, UFR d'études germaniques et nordiques & Institut de l'Océan.

Selective Bibliography

• Estetiske praksiser i den digitale produksjonens tidsalder [Aesthetic practices in the age of digital production] (Eds. Eliassen, K.O. Prytz Ø. & A. Ogundipe), Oslo 2022
• Foucaults begreber [Foucault’s concepts], Copenhagen 2021.
• Stranden. K&K, # 130, [The Beach] (eds. Eliassen, K.O., Meiner, C. & Chr. Messelt), Copenhagen 2020.
• Europeisk litteratur fra Columbus til Kant. bd 3. «Samfunnet», [European literature from Columbus to Kant, vol. 3. “The Society”] (eds. Eliassen, K.O. & A. Fastrup), Århus 2019.
• Contested Qualities (eds. Eliassen, K.O., Hovden, J.F. & Ø. Prytz), 2018.