Theo D’haen, born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1950. Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Professor of English and American Literature at Leiden University.
Fellow (1 September 1998 – 30 June 1999)
During my stay at NIAS I completed about eighty percent of the project I initially proposed to the NIAS Board: “American Identities and Postmodern Writing”. My theoretical starting point is the work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and more specifically their ideas on ‘minor literature’ as formulated in their Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (1975), and on ‘root vs. rhizome’ as formulated in their Mille plateaux (1980). I expect to be able to submit the completed manuscript (about 400 pages) for review to the editor of the University of Virginia Press by Christmas 1999.
Next to the “American Identities and Postmodern Writing” project, I also wrote three chapters for a two volume survey on colonial and postcolonial literatures and completed the editing of these same volumes (to be published in Dutch, by Prometheus), a chapter for a volume on authors working in two cultures and completed the editing of this volume (to be published in Dutch, by Semaian), completed the general editing of the ten volumes of the proceedings of the fifteenth international ICLA Congress I organised in Leiden in 1997 (to be published in English and French, by Rodopi), and wrote four chapters for a volume on contemporary U.S. crime writing (to be published in English, by Macmillan), as well as two articles to be published in Italy and Greece, respectively.