Toikkanen, Jarkko

yliopistonlehtori (ma.)

Vastuuoppialat ja -alueet

englantilainen filologia

Yhteystiedot

sähköposti: sähköpostiosoitehaku
huone: Pinni B 4071
puhelin: 050 3181259

Tutkimusintressit / Research interests

Experience of horror in literature, word and image theory, affect and trauma theory. Defended Ph.D. thesis The Break of Paul de Man in October 2008 (opponent prof. Martin McQuillan, Kingston University, UK). Awarded as outstanding dissertation of the year at the University of Tampere in September 2009.

Käynnissä olevat projektit / Ongoing projects

Suspended Failures: The Intermedial Experience of Horror

The manuscript Suspended Failures: The Intermedial Experience of Horror is an exploration of the phenomenon of horror from an unusual angle. While many studies have focused on establishing horror as a genre, both in literature and film, by distinguishing common elements and a tradition, others have observed horror psychoanalytically, as a catalogue of individual mental disturbances. Suspended Failures takes another approach. It explores horror as an experience, one defined by a break between the words and images witnessed. In literature, where images as such are usually absent and we work from words alone, the experience of horror is therefore intermedially suspended: trapped between words failing to describe the images they generate, the reader has nowhere to go but read on.

Suspended Failures is my first monograph after completing the Ph. D. thesis “The Break of Paul de Man” in 2008. The work is inspired by a perceived lack in the field of horror studies, and provides the perfect opportunity to combine my deconstruction expertise with a topic that is conducive to phenomenological motifs (experience) and contemporary word and image theory (intermediality). This unique blend of materials will produce new knowledge for literary theory and also suggest new lines of inquiry from Romanticism to Modernism in the form of four case studies. In these works by Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Robert Frost and W. B. Yeats, horror is not just a discursive theme but an affective experience with deep vested significance.

What's more

I will complete the book manuscript by January 2013, and it will be released later next year by Palgrave Macmillan with whom I secured a publishing contract this past summer. Another recently finished project, together with Dr. Markku Salmela, was the collected volume of articles The Grotesque and the Unnatural which Cambria Press (New York, US) published in December 2011. Currently active as fixed-term university lecturer, in 2011 I worked as Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Westminster (London, UK), funded by the Alfred Kordelin foundation. Last but not least, in 2011 we also co-edited with Dr. Salmela three issues of Avain — Finnish Review of Literary Studies for the Finnish Literary Research Society (KTS).