CV Arne Melberg
Arne Melberg (b.1942) took his Ph.D. in literature at the University of Stockholm 1973, became full Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo 1987. He has been assigned as visiting scholar / guest-professor in periods from one week to one semester at the following universities in chronological order from 1985 until 2005: Cambridge 1985, UCSB (Santa Barbara) 1987, Yale (New Haven) 1990, Maison des sciences de l’homme (Paris) 1991, Tallinn 1992, Tartu 1993, Riga 1994, Gothenburg1995, Århus 1995, Helsinki 1997, Copenhagen 1999, Frankfurt 2004. He has been guest lecturing at most Scandinavian Universities, furthermore Bremen, Zührich, Norwich, London, Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), Emory (Atlanta), Berlin-Humboldt. He has been faculty opponent in 15 Scandinavian dissertation defences.
He was awarded the Schück Prize by the Swedish Academy in 1998 (given to one prominent literary scholar/critic every year). He was awarded the Essay Prize by the same institution in 2014. He was awarded the John Landqvist prize by De Nio in 2015. He was awarded the translator prize by Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien 2020.
Publication list includes 17 books, 7 anthologies/translations, close to 100 articles counted from the end of the 70’ies, most of them in Scandinavian journals, some in newspapers and the following in international books or journals: ”Repetition in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term” (Diacritics 1990), ”Benjamin’s Reflection” (Modern Language Notes 1992), ”Proust’s Version of Inversion” (EST 1994), ”Rilke´s Poetical Figures” (Interart Poetics 1997), ”Aesthetic Negativity” (Kierkegaardiana 1999), ”Reading Heads” (Aesthetic Theory 2000), ”Turns and Echoes” (Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin 1999), ”Rilkes Malte: Noch ein Scandinavier in Paris?” (Poetica 2000), ”In Nietzsches Labyrinth” (Text und Kontext 2001), “Modernist Time / Realist Time” (In Realism and its Discontents, 2003), “The Work of Art in the Age of Ontological Speculation. Walter Benjamin Revisited” (In Walter Benjamin and Art 2005). Books include 7 scholarly works, one published in Swedish (1992), Polish (2002) and English (Cambridge 1995) as Theories of Mimesis. In 2007 he edited the volume Aesthetics at Work and in 2008 he published Aesthetics of Prose, both on www.unipub.no.
Latest works are monographies in Swedish on Hölderlin (1996) and Rilke (1998), in Swedish and Norwegian on Montaigne (2000, German version as Versuch über Montaigne, Edition Isele 2003) and in Swedish and Norwegian on Nietzsche (2001), a scholarly book on travel writing in Swedish and Norwegian (2005). the anthology Aesthetics at work (2007) a book on ”life writing” and Aesthetics of Prose (2008), and a book on Literary Capri (together with Enel Melberg), a commented anthology on the history of the essay (in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish 2013), a book on literature and time (2015), a book on Olof Lagercrantz as a reader (2017), a book on Görean Sonnevi’s poetry (2018), a book on reading prose (2020), a collection of essays (2020). He has also translated 17th Century literature from France and England.
He has contributed to curriculum books in literary theory and written most part of a world literary history, volume 5 (19th Century) published in three Scandinavian languages (1985ff) and contributed to an introductory book on reading poetry (2004). He has also published some novels, a travel book and a couple of collection of essays, the latest (2003) in Swedish as an essayistic monography on his academic life: Mitt i litteraturen (2002), condensed Norwegian version in the journal Samtiden as “CV” (2003). He is also a regular contributor of essays and reviews to Norwegian and Swedish newspapers, specially Klassekampen and Svenska Dagbladet.
He has supervised 20 doctorate candidates. Started the Aesthetic Seminar at the University of Oslo 1988 and was in the board until 2000, organising in that capacity some 50 seminars of international standard, also leading a faculty project on fin-de-siècle-culture 1998-99. Responsible for starting and developing the faculty graduate school in literature 1992-96, organising in that capacity ca 10 research seminars on local, national or Scandinavian level. During 2002-2007 he was leading a research project on contemporary aesthetics, Aesthetics at Work, financed by the Norwegian Research Council.