GSSC Seminar Series
29 April 2025
Interpretative Agility: Engaging with Texts and the World
Per Esben Svelstad (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
12:00-13:00
Humans are interpreting creatures. We strive to understand the world around us and to adapt to the way our human and nonhuman companions respond to our actions. In this talk, I will present a key concept from an ongoing project: interpretative agility. Using examples of creative and exploratory classroom work on literary texts, I highlight how students move between different understandings, interpretations, and objectives. I build on posthuman theory in order to describe this agility as a result of assemblages that actualize capacities in the texts as well as in participants. Thus, I claim that Education for Sustainability and the Environment (ESE) can provide a useful framework for literary education and, conversely, that literary education can play a vital role in pluralist ESE.