Following the recent celebration of Kafka in 2024, the theme of metamorphosis has regained relevance. This concept is often associated with Kafka's 1912 work The Metamorphosis, as well as with Ovid's Metamorphoses (c. 8 BC). While these two works limit transformation to the external, Zweig's Rausch der Verwandlung (The Intoxication of Transformation, 1982) focuses on the connection between external transformation and internal, identity-forming mutation. In the story, the poor, insecure postal assistant Christine Hoflehner briefly becomes the wealthy, self-confident Christiane von Boolen in a Swiss luxury hotel. Social recognition confirms the young woman's new self-image. However, the abrupt return to her former life proves extremely problematic because the brief experience of transformation has altered Christine's perception of reality, causing her to feel alienated from both the world of luxury she experienced and her previous life. The only thing left is an awareness of social injustice and the rigidity of the social structure: the metamorphosis as an experiment in social change has failed.

I am pleased to announce the pre-order of the anthology "An Interdisciplinary Approach to Climate Change: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities", edited by Andrea Catellani, Louise-Amélie Cougnon, Øyvind Gjerstad and Armelle Nugier, and published by Routledge. The book is a collection of papers from the highly interesting conference organised by the University of Louvain in May 2024, "Overcoming Obstacles to Climate Change Mitigation: A Cross-Cutting Approach by the Human and Social Sciences". You will find my own contribution, "Science and Literature in Alliance Against the Anthropocene: Andri Snær Magnason's On Time and Water and Aurélien Barrau's L'Hypothèse K." under chapter 5.

New publication to come soon.

My research develops a new interdisciplinary method called ‘legal counterfactual’ for analyzing law in literature. Building on the American law and literature movement it aims to strengthen this emerging field in Europe.
The method involves extracting legal discourse from literary texts and contrasting it with real-world law to improve communication between legal and literary scholars. After examining theoretical foundations (interdisciplinarity, discourse, hermeneutics), the approach identifies common ground between the disciplines: written text as shared basis and hermeneutics as analytical tool.
The method is tested on five contemporary works: La décision (Tuil), Sworn Virgin (Dones), Unorthodox (Feldman), Repenti (Chossat), and A Slap in the Face (Khider), demonstrating its practical application across different legal systems and literary traditions.

This article analyzes Anna Seghers' Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen (The Excursion of the Dead Girls) from a discourse linguistic perspective, focusing on its complex temporal narrative structure.
The story uses analepsis (flashbacks) and prolepsis (foreshadowing) as the first-person narrator Netty recalls a school trip to the Rhine while simultaneously revealing the characters' future tragic fates. Written from Seghers' Mexican exile, the narrative blurs boundaries between the fictional narrator Netty Reiling and author Anna Seghers herself.
The analysis examines how Seghers employs Genette's concept of temporal anachrony to create multiple time layers within the story, enhanced by various forms of memory and reminiscence, and connected to the Vanitas tradition. The result is a temporally complex, presumably autobiographical narrative that interweaves past, present, and future through sophisticated narrative techniques.

Saúl, a farmer and mountain guide in the Peruvian Andes, sees his life and that of his family and thousands of people in his village threatened by climate change, as the melting water from the nearby glacier will flood everything beyond. He has filed a lawsuit against the German energy company RWE, holding it responsible for its part in causing...

Diagnostique de la maladie de la terre au stade de l'effondrement: "Hypothèse K.: prolifération technométastastique du cancer numéricomachinique porté par un hôte-humain hébété et engourdi mais déjà symptomatique. Croissance tue-morale. Espoir ou désir d'une thérapie bégayante qui pense l'organicité au-delà de l'organe et la guérison par-delà...

Un livre tout aussi important pour comprendre l'urgence et la manière d'agir face au changement climatique est celui de l'astrophysicien français Aurelien Barrau. Il nous alerte sur la disparition à une vitesse dramatique des espèces vivantes sur terre et l'urgence de penser le monde non pas en termes de rentabilité économique, mais en termes de...

The climate issue is more urgent than ever, it is a matter of life or death and this statement is not an exaggeration. But the problem is worldwide, global and therefore so difficult to grasp and to understand terminologically. Terms like 'global warming', 2° celsius limit, datas of CO2 emissions mean little to most people.