Zlatan Filipovic
Senior Lecturer
Department of Languages and LiteraturesAbout Zlatan Filipovic
Background
I came to Sweden as a refugee from Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s and have studied English, Theoretical Philosophy and Art History at several universities in both Sweden and abroad. Currently Associate Professor in English and Comparative Literature, I have been at the University of Gothenburg since 2010, previously as a Senior Lecturer and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. I received my Master of Research degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I also completed my doctoral studies in English and Comparative Literature in 2009.
Core Values in Teaching and Learning
In my view, the classroom is a discursive space—a site of formative exchange where the limits of established and normative knowledges are continually negotiated in order to emancipate difference. This negotiation is driven by generative ruptures in the encounter between students, teachers and texts that enable transformative learning. Such an encounter, however, relies on a pedagogical milieu that ensures a polyphony of experience—a multicultural classroom distinguished by a radical pluralism in terms of class, gender and ethnicity.
It is not consensus but rather dissensus that powers learning and critical self-awareness. In other words, I can only develop if there is always an Other who claims ownership of my world and places my possession of it in question. A pedagogical approach is thus always already an ethical one, presupposing an openness to the Other’s singular attestation of humanity and specific historical conditions. This constitutes the basis for change, and change is inherently affirmative.
Kafka’s analogy in his letter to Oskar Pollak where literature should ‘wound and stab us… affect us like a disaster’ serves as a suitable metaphor for this process. Because, like literature, learning should also be ‘an axe against the frozen sea within us.’
Translating these values into practice, I teach extensively across the fields of literature and theory, with an emphasis on modernism, postmodernism and contemporary writing. I approach these fields through a methodology informed by poststructuralism and critical literacy, challenging students to deconstruct normative certainties and engage with the radical pluralism of the modern world.
Research
My primary research trajectory is situated within the frameworks of poststructuralism and modern literary aesthetics, though my scholarly interests cover a broad spectrum of literary theory and the philosophical foundations that inform our understanding of literature and culture. The focal point of my work lies at the intersection of literature and continental philosophy, which I see as an encounter that provides a compelling and critically productive field of inquiry.
Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and the pervasive impact of continental thought on our understanding of social and cultural practice are of critical importance in my research. My latest projects consider ethical approaches to subjectivity and otherness in Levinas’s writing and their articulation in modern literature, as well as emergent inquiries in posthumanism, ecophenomenology and ecocriticism.