Karin Kukkonen
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Karin Kukkonen is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo (Norway). Her research revolves around literature as a means to reconfigure our lifeworlds. She has worked on creativity in literary writing, literary form and probability, and embodied approaches to literature. She is particularly interested how the literary form of the novel and its creative investments change across history. Her current project, JEUX – Literary Games, Poetics and the Early-Modern Novel, is funded by the ERC (2024-2028). She has held fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2018-2019) and the EHESS (2021).
Karin Kukkonen joins the Paris IAS in May 2026 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
History of the Novel; Literary Games; Creativity.
Reconstructing Jeux d’Esprit
Thoses who attended the salons practiced their collective creativity in conversations and gameplay. We have evidence of the extensive personal networks that spanned from these salons across the cultural, social and political landscape in correspondence, salon-writings, etc. and it is well-known that many novelists in the seventeenth century regularly joined the salons and developed their works in dialogue with other salon members. An exclusively text-centred approach struggles, however, to recover the sponteneous, sparkling nature of these interactions.
As part of the project JEUX (ERC 2024-2028), Karin Kukkonen has reconstructed a series of literary games and played in the framework of creative-writing workshops. The games were surprisingly playable, even three hundred years later, and shed light on creative practices in the salons. The fellow will develop a framework that shifts the emphasis from approaching the salons through their texts to approaching them through the practices of the salons.
More generally, she will propose a means for analysing literary texts through the practices behind them that is conceived in parallel with reconstructive analysis in other disciplines, such as musicians playing historical scores with period-specific instruments and art historians experimenting with historical materials and tools. The project will outline how literary games can similarly still be played and offer a means to explore historically distant practices.
Key publications
Kukkonen, Karin. 2025. Creativity and Contingency in Literary Writing. Bloomsbury.
DOI: 10.5040/9781350522695
Kukkonen, Karin, 2020. Probability Designs: Literature and Predictive Processing. Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190050955.001.0001
Kukkonen, Karin. 2019. How the Novel Found its Feet: 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190913045.003.0001
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