I am Victoria Lauritsen, currently doing my Master's Degree in Comparative Literature, and have been lucky enough to join LCE as a research assistant since January. My work mostly revolves around website-related tasks, but I'm also involved in preparing for events like this one.
As someone getting to know LCE several years after its foundation, I quite enjoyed listening to the welcome speech by Karin Kukkonen (Centre Director). She was joined by Christine Meklenborg Nilsen (Head of Department at ILOS), Frode Helland (Dean at the Faculty of Humanities) and Anne Mangen (Professor at the Norwegian Centre for Reading Education and Research) who all drew attention to LCE’s interdisciplinary achievements. Nilsen could with a proud smile on her face say that LCE has succeeded in gathering researchers across institutes and faculties on an exceptional range.
Anne Mangen represented LCE’s cooperation with groups and centres outside the University of Oslo. She talked about the ongoing collaboration Deep Literary Reading Pilot, and left the audience in a puzzled state by revealing that the experiment included students sitting in the same room where the centre launch took place, reading their course reading for the entire day, some of them without access to their smartphones. The audience was amused over Mangen’s description of the experiment; being told that the experiment lasted over three days, it sounded like the students weren't able to leave the room for quite some time. When Mangen realised what she had said, and emphasized that “The students were of course sent home after the experiment every day”, the audience burst out laughing. I could still hear someone chuckling and struggling to maintain themselves when Mangen had moved on. Still, the appeal of spending prolonged periods of time with a literary text, without disruptions by smartphones, was felt by many and underlined Mangen’s point.
After a warm and entertaining welcome, the guests were invited to learn more about LCE research by visiting “stations”, where members of the centre presented how their work unfolds in practices, such as the "Manuscript Group", "Corpus Group" and "Get in touch with the Empirical". Ylva Østby Berger's "I remember" station offered the possibility to engage in a creative writing exercise.
I took the papers from "I remember" with me back to the office after the event, and had a great time reading the guests’ different memories: "I remember the view from Sophus Bugge". On my end it has always been the smell. I don’t think I ever will forget the feeling of stepping into Sophus Bugge in August after a long holiday. The smell does not hit you in the face, it slowly welcomes you with waves of anticipation (sweat), stuffy air, and books – oh, I do find that smell oddly lovely. Another guest remembered that she had to stop by a grocery store on her way home. That certainly left me thinking. Many struggle to imagine professors in normal everyday settings, like in a grocery store, but these everyday elements also inform creative writing of those engaging with literature on a professional basis – through the bridge of personal memory.
The poster exhibition of LCE publications was likewise a popular place to spend a few minutes. It was filled with articles published by LCE Centre members, and covered a wide range of topics like “The Fluid Transmission of Apocrypha in Egyptian Monasteries” (Hugo Lundhaug), to “Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and the “Utopian Glimmer of [Auto]fiction” (Alexandra Effe). I personally found the posters about forthcoming books the most interesting, probably because of the excitement to get a little sneak-peak before the rest of the world about forthcoming work from LCE.
Guests were also invited to bring their own questions about anything related to "Literature, Cognition and Emotions", which were answered later by a panel of past, present and future centre leaders, moderated by Alexandra Effe and Sarah Bro Trasmundi.
I will not get into specific detail of all that was discussed, but let’s just say that the panel covered everything from how a child at a very early stage understands that Superman and SpongeBob can’t coexist in the same universe, to how a reader ends up with a pile of favourite books.
The event ended with a toast (of course) to celebrate past achievements, and the promising future of LCE, now Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions.
Victoria Lauritsen
LCE Research Assistant