Stefanie Heine

Stefanie Heine

Tenure Track Adjunkt

 

Primary fields of research

 

  • Modern and contemporary literature
  • Intermediality
  • Literary theory
  • Materiality and embodiment
  • Writing processes and practices of reading
  • Anthropocene approaches and ecocriticism

 

In my research, I focus on interrelations between the material dimensions of art and the human body and between production and reception processes as well as the tensions between representation and incorporation.

In my latest book Poetics of Breathing, I investigated how breathing and its rhythms—liminal, syncopal, and usually inconspicuous—became a core poetic and compositional principle in modern literature. Works across genres and languages allude to breath and incorporate pneumatic rhythms, from sound carried on the breath to silent pauses—often reflecting in the process on their own mediality, production, and reception. Poetics of Breathing is an investigation of the writing processes and literary works of key figures in the history of breath writing. After a critical examination of the rhetorical history of pneuma, I turned to in-depth comparative readings of paired figures, allowing their specific respirational poetics to emerge in conspirational dialogue with each other: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Robert Musil and Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan and Herta Müller. Focusing especially on those moments where the physiology of breathing and the physicality of literature interpenetrate and interrupt each other, Poetics of Breathing reads breathing texts as human–nonhuman assemblages. Respiratory writing, reading, and listening all involve moments of exposure, encounters with the outside and with the other, destabilizing allegedly clear-cut boundaries between the organic and inorganic. A challenge to historical and contemporary discourses that tie breath to the transcendent and the natural, Poetics of Breathing traces a decoupling of breath from its traditional association with life, and asks what literature might lie beyond.

Intersections between the animate and inanimate are also the starting point for my new project, which is tentatively titled Post-Organicism. Rethinking the idea of aesthetic organicism, I want to investigate entanglements between organic and inorganic matter, form, and phenomena in different artforms. A first step is an edited volume on Mineral Poetics, which will be published in spring 2022. I am also working on a book dedicated to the material interrelations between desert landscapes and language in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

 

Teaching

I have taught numerous courses in Comparative Literature covering topics like “Mineral Literature and Poetics”, “Narcissus’ Echo”, “Trauma Literature”, “ Breath, Voice, and Rhythm in Poetry and Poetics”, “Criticism, Cooperation, Coproduction”, “Aesthetic Permanence and Fleetingness”, “Literature of Revolt”, “Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener”, “Childhood Literature”, “Poetics of Pop-Songs” or “Visual Arts in Literature of the 19th and 20th century”.

Primære forskningsområder

  • Litteratur i de 20. og 21. århundrede
  • Intermedialitet
  • Litteraturteori
  • Materialitet og kropslighed
  • Skriveprocesser og læseprocesser
  • Økokritik, antropocæne tilgange, miljøæstetik

Aktuel forskning

Jeg beskæftiger mig med relationer mellem de materielle aspekter af litteratur/kunst, den menneskelige krop, og ikke-menneskelige væsner, ting, og økosystemer. I min seneste bog Poetics of Breathing (SUNY 2022) undersøgte jeg, hvordan vejrtrækning blev et centralt poetisk emne og kompositionsprincip i litteraturen i de 20. og 21. århundrede. Jeg var særligt optaget af at dekonstruere den traditionelle kobling imellem vejrtrækning og livet og udforskede respiratoriske tekster som destabiliserer grænser mellem det organiske og det uorganiske. Interaktioner mellem det organiske og det uorganiske er udgangspunktet for mit nye forskningsprojekt om mineralske materialer i kunst og litteratur og geoæstetik. Som første trin i dette projekt har jeg udgivet tidskriftsnummeret Mineral Poetics (figurationen 1/22) og skrevet bogen Tangential Terrains: Cormac McCarthys Geoaesthetics (forthcoming).

Undervisnings- og vejledningsområder

Jeg underviser regelmæssigt Litteraturteori og Analyse I & II på BA-niveau. Jeg underviser også på kandidatuddannelsen i økokritiske emner. Tidligere har jeg undervist kurser om Robert Musil’s Manden uden egenskaber, mineralsk litteratur og poetik, Narcis’ ekko i kunst og litteratur, vejrtrækning, stemme og rytme i litteratur, litterær koproduktion, litteratur og revolte, Melville’s Bartleby, litteratur og barndom, popsange og poetik, og litteratur og visuel kunst i de 19. og 20. århundrede.

 

Vejledningsområder

  • Litteratur i de 20. og 21. århundrede
  • Intermedialitet
  • Litteraturteori
  • Materialitet og kropslighed
  • Skriveprocesser og læseprocesser
  • Økokritik, antropocæne tilgange, miljøæstetik

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