Overview
Cassandra Falke is a Professor of English Literature at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, where she also leads the Interdisciplinary Phenomenology research group. She has published on a range of topics including class, violence, love and human rights, often working between phenomenology and literature. Her published monographs include Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820-1848 and The Phenomenology of Love and Reading. Two more are forthcoming: Global Human Rights Fiction and Wise Passiveness: Phenomenologies of Receptivity in British Romantic Poetry. In prior collaborative work, she has edited four essay collections and two special issues. Her current inquiries address contemporary global anglophone novels and questions of ethical implication beyond readers´ embodied perceptual horizons. She uses the figure of the witness to consider proximity, interpretive imagining, and responsibility. Falke has taught three dozen different courses but especially enjoys teaching literary theory and first-year surveys. She is a former Fulbrighter and has received grants from the NEH and NOS-HS. She was president of the American Studies Association of Norway from 2018-2022.
Research Focus
Reader as Witness: Contemporary Fiction and the Silences of History
This project investigates contemporary novels about political violence occurring since World War Two, during the so-called Age of Human Rights. Having spent 2021-23 writing a book that defines this body of work as Global Human Rights Fiction(Routledge), I hope, in 2024-26, to theorize the ways this literature calls readers to greater responsibility for rights protection, using an ethically-oriented phenomenology of reading I began developing in The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2017). That book used interpersonal relationships as a model for the ethical reception of stories, but such a model is not scalable to the level of global discourses. Building on work by Kelly Oliver, Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Ranciére, the new book, provisionally entitled Reader as Witness: Encountering Violent Histories through Fiction, will articulate a phenomenology of reading that attends to both the intersubjective level of human becoming and a reader´s always singular position in the broader social structures that compose our unequal world.
During my fellowship year, I plan to write three chapters of the new book, each concerned with forms of silence and silencing. One will address the ways restrictive expectations for story forms contort or exclude alternative narratives. Another will investigate silence as by turns protective, compassionate, or complicit. A third contrasts the mute facticity of dead bodies with equally quiet textual archives. How do these works inscribe the gap between embodied and textual knowing? The narratives my project examines do not settle suffering into meaning, but speaking across the distance between peace and war, privilege and want, they make us witness to stories we don´t hear and transform the kind of attention we give to the unjustly partitioned realms of public storytelling.