Sonka Hinders
Sonka Hinders
Abstract
My dissertation aims to investigate how retrospective representations of reading in contemporary literature conceptualise the future of reading in the face of digitalisation. The rise of digital technologies throughout the last decades has led to the prominent Western discourse that there is a decline in reading, often connected to a loss of humanist values. A second influential discourse claims that Western culture is exceptionally engaged with the past as a refuge from the fast-paced digital world. My dissertation investigates how contemporary literature connects these two discourses. In line with academic examinations of retrospection in contemporary Western culture, I view retrospection - serving as an umbrella term for concepts such as memory, nostalgia, retro, trauma, hauntology and the archive - as a potentially constructive phenomenon in which humans access the past to imagine the future. My dissertation studies how retrospection, occurring on textual, medial and commercial levels in a selection of contemporary literary works, creates new understandings of reading which are simultaneously inspired by the past and digital developments. I aim to provide a framework of characteristics which describe emerging reading practices, based on interactions and overlaps of retrospection and reading.
Short biography
since 10/2021
Scholarship holder in the MWK doctoral programme "Shaping the future. Transformation of the present through scenarios of digitalisation" at the University of Oldenburg
2021
Internship in the music editorial department of radioeins (rbb)
2018-2021
Research assistant in the English Studies student office at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
2018-2021
M.A. Comparative Studies in English and American Language, Literature, and Culture at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
2018
Student assistant at the State Media Authority NRW in the field of journalism promotion
2017-2018
Orientation tutor for first-semester students of English/American Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
2015-2021
Editor, presenter and head of music at the campus radio station hochschulradio düsseldorf
2014-2018
B.A. English/American Studies & Musicology at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and the University of Reading, England
Lectures
2022
Oh, the boy's a Slack: Exhausted Materiality and (post-)digital Reading in Calvin Kasulke's Several People Are Typing; conference "Literatur am Ende - Putting *Schöpfung* in *Erschöpfung*", Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 16-18 November 2022
Love Machine Reading: Exploring Human-AI Relations through Reading Practices in I'm Your Man (2021); SLSA Annual Conference "Reading Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, and the Reading Human", Purdue University, USA, 06-09 October 2022
2020
ARTificial Intelligence: Anthropology and Art in Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me; student conference "Made and Remade Continually", Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, 28-29 January 2020
Publications
Hinders, Sonka. "'Oh, the boy's a Slack'. Exhaustion, book, and screen in Calvin Kasulke's Several People Are Typing (2021)." Literature at the end: Putting *Creation* in *Exhaustion*, edited by Denise Dumschat-Rehfeldt et al., Büchner, 2024, pp. 105-117, https://www.buechner-verlag.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/9783963179136_oa.pdf
Hinders, Sonka. "Read Carefully! Conceptualising Reading as Care in The Book of Form & Emptiness and My Salinger Year." On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, vol. 16, 2024, https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2024.1404
Hinders, Sonka. "(Pod)casting a Bridge: Lolita Podcast and Its Reading Practices." Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 2023, pp. 64-79, http://dx.doi.org/10.5283/copas.362
further publications
Hinders, Sonka "'In this space, all the stories are alive.'-In Conversation with Thea Mantwill and Jana Buch about Reading (in) their Literary Exhibition 13 Morgen." On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, vol. 16, 2024, https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2024.1405
Hinders, Sonka. "Giant Interior Large." Opposite, Sept. 2023, https://www.goethe.de/prj/geg/de/thm/gg1/24994449.html
Monthly music programme International Music on the local radio station oldenburg eins