NOKSA2024: Keynote I
In this keynote, Associate Professor and Head of the Hans Christian Andersen Center at the University of Southern Denmark, Torsten Bøgh Thomsen, will introduce 19th century deliberations on art and nature as expressed in Hans Christian Andersen’s writings. The views on the human, nature and materiality that arise in Andersen’s texts are interesting in relation to current philosophical and aesthetic discussions about climate and the environment. Not only because Danish romanticism in many ways produced views on nature and humanity that are still in effect, but also because romanticism unfolded alongside the industrialization that set global warming in motion. Andersen wrote with a skepticism in relation to human self-aggrandizement, an ambivalence towards romantic glorification of nature and a sensibility towards the material world that seems strikingly relevant in our time.