Vladimir Cepciansky
 

Contact: vladimir.cepciansky@littvet.su.se

Research project: “The Spirit of Satire”. My dissertation project explores the relationship between satire and spirit in late modernity, specifically the ways in which the satirical spirit articulates itself in the interplay between politics (depending on a subject's structured relationship to others or on the sunkenness in life), literature (depending on writing, translation, and survival), philosophy (depending on the ideal abstraction from life), and religion (depending on the idea of an eternal life). I am interested in the mixture of these domains (their differences and their inseparability) as a way of articulating both the specificity of the genre itself and the historical particularity of the satirized “object”. My focus lies on the shared role of philosophy and literature as catalysts for this mixture in general and on their specific role as catalysts for the modern idea of human freedom in particular. Acknowledging that satire, according to Hegel, is situated in the hiatus between art as the creation of self-consciousness (in antiquity) and art as the satisfactions of self-consciousness (in modernity), I focus on satire as this border to cognitive freedom or truth (the freedom to know, not just to think) in the curious triad of literary influence formed by James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Jacques Derrida.

Principal supervisor: Professor Anders Olsson, Department of Literature and History of Ideas, Stockholm University.

Interests: Literature and philosophy, European modernism, humour, aesthetic experience and knowledge, the uncanny and its discourses (phenomenology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction), religion and literature.