sien uytterschout

Sien Uytterschout has been affiliated with the English Department of Ghent University as a pre-doctoral researcher since December 2006. She holds degrees from the University of Antwerp (MA in American Studies, 2006) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (teacher training certificate, 2007; licentiate in Germanic Philology, 2005).

From 2006-2007 she was employed on the research project ‘Walking the Border/Lost on the Borderlands: The Discursive Construction of Diasporic Identities in Contemporary Jewish American Literature’, under the supervision of Professor Kristiaan Versluys. 

In 2008 she was employed as a part-time assistant to Professor Kristiaan Versluys, the Director of Studies at Ghent University’s Faculty of Arts and Philosophy.

She has recently been granted a four-year scholarship by Ghent University’s Research Council to work on a PhD entitled Writing ‘9/12’: the After-Existence of September 11 in Literature, a project which started in January 2009. The project focuses on those 9/11-novels in which the events (with their national and international ramifications) 'merely' serve as a  backdrop to the more small-scaled (but not necessarily less drastic) turning points in the different protagonists’ personal lives. In concreto, the research will focus on the following novels: Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Jay McInnerney’s The Good Life (2006), Claire Messud's The Emperor’s Children (2006), Helen Schulman's A Day at the Beach (2007), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), and Anita Shreve’s A Wedding in December (2005). Without wanting to erode away the inherent incommensurability of September 11, every one of these authors can be said to (attempt to) work towards an adequate discursive response to the attacks, e.g. by means of other disaster narratives such as the explosion in Halifax harbour in 1917 (Shreve), personal aggression (McEwan), the disappearance of a child (Schwartz), and looming family break ups (McInnerney, Schulman).

 

Bibliography

Uytterschout, Sien, and Kristiaan Versluys. "Melancholy and Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." Orbis Litterarum 63.3 (2008): 216-36.

Uytterschout, Sien. “Visualised Incomprehensibility of Trauma in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik.   51.1 (2008): 61-74

Uytterschout, Sien. "An Extremely Loud Tin Drum. A Comparative Study of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum. [in press @ Comparative Literature Studies]

Bollen, Katrien, and Sien Uytterschout. "Touching the Void. An Analysis of Patrick McGrath's Ground Zero." [submitted for publication at the Journal of American Studies]