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Reception for Matthias Stephan

Matthias Stephan defended his PhD in Comparative Literature on December 11, 2015 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Info about event

Time

Friday 20 May 2016,  at 14:00 - 16:30
[Translate to English:] Matthias Stephan

The dissertation, entitled The Postmodern Structure of Consciousness, used the genres of science fiction and detective fiction (in literature, film and television) to define postmodernism. He is currently a viden-skabelig assistant in the Department of English here at Aarhus Univer-sity, where he has been teaching for the past six years. He has pre-sented conference papers and lectures on Postmodernism, Detective Fiction, Science Fiction and Romanticism in the United States and across Europe. He is the head of the Celebrity and Fan Cultures Re-search Unit in the Cultural Transformations Research Group at Aarhus University. He also serves as the co-editor of Otherness: Essays and Studies (otherness.dk).


His dissertation presents a reductive definition of the concept of literary postmodernism. As such, he identifies the metaphor of the postmodern structure of consciousness as the best tool by which to both identify and understand postmodernism in its literary expression. This is done through an analysis of epistemological and ontological questions, con-sidered specifically in the categories of detective fiction and science fiction respectively. Those genres were chosen because they best ex-emplify texts which have epistemological and ontological dominants, and through an analysis of the genres themselves, and their inherent structures, he argues that one can see how the postmodern structure of consciousness comes to serve as the best means by which to under-stand our contemporary society. Through the structural nature of this understanding he sees this as reflective of a postmodern under-standing of society, he argues that postmodernism allows for the change sought after within society as currently constructed, and this project identifies the structural means by which such change can come about.

There will be a reception on May 20, 2016 at 14:00
in Building 1481, room 366, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4,
8000 Aarhus C.