The work of Thijs Lijster from the University of Groningen in the project Essays Beyond Borders consists of developing and offering workshops on the history, theory and practice of essay writing to university students and to a non-academic public.
The workshops for students will be offered within designated programs within the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen; the workshops for non-academic publics will be offered in cooperation with institutions outside of the university.
Apart from this, Thijs Lijster will work together with Mario Aquilina on an edited volume on the relation between essayism and ecological awareness. Lijster will do this by researching the philosophical underpinnings of the ‘planetary’, a concept introduced by philosopher and literary scholar Gayatri Spivak, who contrasts this concept to the ‘global’. While the ‘globe’ designates the Earth as seen from an outsider’s perspective (as an exploitable object), the ‘planet’ is the place we inhabit and are tied to, and which we share with countless of other creatures. “If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents”, Spivak writes, “alterity remains underived from us.” Lijster will explore how the ‘essayistic’ is a form of writing and thinking highly suitable to reflect on his ‘alterity’.
