Transcultural aesthetics

Transcultural Aesthetics is a research project at the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. The project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council for a three year period beginning in the spring of 2008 and initially ending in the spring of 2011. However, the project has been extended and will run until Nov., 2013. Transcultural Aesthetics consists at present of a core group of four locally based scholars, international affiliates and a global transdisciplinary network of researchers.

The primary objectives of the project are to shed light on the dialogue between contemporary literature and central aspects of today's media culture, and to develop analytical tools that will better enable us to understand and describe the esthetic norms, values and positions that this literature conveys.

More specifically, we aim to:
1) Develop knowledge about forms of expression, aesthetic values and positions found in media culture and thereby build expertise in this area within the field of Scandinavian Studies.

2) Examine how border crossing contributes to changes in creative expression through the analysis of literary texts marked by media culture in the form of hybridization, genre blending, intermediality and/or multimodality.