Teemu Ikonen
FT, yleisen kirjallisuustieteen dosentti
teemu.ikonen@utu.fi ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7121-1102 |
experimental literature, adaptation, contemporaneity in literature, narratology, 18th century literature, conceptual history of comparative literature
reseach on translatability of experimental literature in the project "Narrative Text, Translator and Machine: In Search of User-Friendly Translation Technology for Literary Texts"
For my MA (1993) I studied comparative literature, philosophy, aesthetics, theatre studies and women's studies at the University of Helsinki.
I got my research training in the graduate school "Narrative and Textual Theory" hosted by the universities of Helsinki and Tampere. I wrote my PhD thesis (2000) on Denis Diderot's relation to the poetics of imitation.
After the PhD I worked as the editor-in-chief in the cultural magazine Nuori Voima (2000-2003).
My post-doctoral research was focused on the status of narrative in the literary debates in the late 18th century France and England. As a visiting scholar at the Ohio State University (2006) I delved into postclassical narratology.
After gaining the docentship (2010) I have worked as a university lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Tampere (2012-18) and as an independent scholar. I continue to work for the rapprochement of theory and pratice of literature in the Society for Possible Literature (2012-) and in Post-Oulipo ry (2018-) dedicated to procedural writing.
My research is focused on the modelling of narratological information and information of non-narrative literary macro structures. In the two-year-long project, translation will first be situated on the map of interoperal relationships by applying the results of my recent project on adaptation. My theory of interoperality provides a systematic chart of variables in the source text – target text relations. After distinguishing the variables relevant to translation, the study will focus on examining the extent to which such macro structures can be programmed, so that they may contribute to the development of a translation tool.
The material of the study consists of existing translations of Finnish language experimental prose and of international experimental prose from the past twenty years. In addition, I will curate new translations with the Finnish literary group Post-Oulipo, focusing on procedural writing, and with the international group on procedural translation, Outranspo. The selection of the material aims at bringing into play the variety of conceptual and procedural macro structures relevant to literary translation and at putting the defining features of narrativity to test.
