Talk will Kristoffer Leandoer

On Thursday, May the 18th, at 18:00, the United Nations Association Albania (UNAA) hosts at Berk, a lecture by Kristoffer Leandoer, entitled " Is Literature a Visual or an Aural Form of Art?", inviting the participants to reflect on literature and everyone's abilities, limitations and possibilities.

“Nowadays, literature is usually defined as something that happens on the written page: a visual form of communication, even though literature began as memorized recitation and continued so for centuries. By looking into how sight affects texts, this talk tries to show that literature belongs exclusively to neither sense, but maybe is a sense of its own. With examples from the texts of visually impaired writers through the history of literature, ranging from John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” to the amateur ornithologist J. A. Baker’s” The Peregrine”, we investigate the role that limited eyesight can have for the literary imagination. When the link weakens between the mind and its factual surroundings, we discover, sometimes the result is imaginary worlds of extraordinary richness or horror, such as in the colossal creation of” Paradise Lost”. We also follow British writer Aldous Huxley and his struggle to improve his eyesight first by willpower alone, and then with hallucinative drugs, which raises another question: is literature really a form of lucid dreaming? We finish with the metaphysical renaissance poets like Thomas Traherne, who imagined what the world would look like if you had no senses at all: a world of pure fiction, pure imagination. A world, maybe, that consists of pure literature.”

Kristoffer Leandoer

This event comes within the framework of ArtNexus, an international program run by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee (SAGC) and the Swedish Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) partially implemented in Albania by UNAA. The program promotes artistic freedom, everyone and the politics of the democratic process through cooperation with the selected partner. ArtNexus aims for communities of artists to practice and make a living through their art, enabling education in the field of art. In this framework, ArtNexus is supporting an artistic and educational program that intentionally brings together professional visual artists and visually impaired people in an endeavor to co-create and challenge their perspectives about artistic creativity. Annex makes use of dialogue, artistic workshops/masterclasses, reading sessions/Art Talks, art productions/exhibitions and exchanges to invite the participants in reflecting processes on everyone's constraints and abilities.

Kristoffer Leandoer,

born in Stockholm 1962, is a Swedish high-profile poet, essayist, literary critic, novelist and translator. His debut in 1987, the poetry selection Dykarklocka (Diving Bell) has been followed by a varied bibliography consisting of more than 30 published books, including horror stories, fantasy novels, a major work on French literary history (The House That Proust Built. 200 Years of French Modernism). He is many times awarded for his essays about the nature of literature and the process of reading and writing and is twice nominated for the prestigious August Prize – in 2010 (the essay Mask. Literature as Hiding Place) and in 2020 (the essay Longing Home, Longing Away, currently being translated into Albanian). His latest book, the essay Den oavslutade litteraturen (Unfinished Literature) was published in January 2023 and has spent the spring as a steady feature on literary critics’ favourite lists. One time member of the Nobel committee, Leandoer currently lives in Tirana.