International Kierkegaard Newsletter 2003

No. 25 . October 2003 ISSN 0108-3104

EDITORIAL:

Dear Friends, I am happy to introduce to you the International Kierkegaard Newsletter for 2003. Please keep sending me information for its pages. Every effort is made to get material on line as soon as it arrives. Grateful thanks to all those who regularly send me items of all kinds on Kierkegaard, not least material about their own Kierkegaard activities.

Obituary: I am grieved to have to report the passing of yet another Kierkegaard friend, Rafael Larrañeta, who died in Madrid in 2002. Begonya Saez Tajafuerce has written a fine tribute to Rafael in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, 45, March, 2003. I will therefore here limit myself to some personal memories. I first met Rafael (and his wife Dolores) at the Department of Kierkegaard Research in Copenhagen where Rafael had come to do research on Kierkegaard. Initially, communication was difficult, since we discovered that Danish was our only language of communication and Rafael had only recently begun to speak it. However, we managed, and I will never forget his warm greeting of a morning: "Hvorrdan gårr det?" Rafael went on to finish his doctorate and make a major contribution to Kierkegaard research in Spain where, at the time of his death, he was teaching at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. Over the many years Rafael (and Dolores) kept in touch from Spain and Rafael kept me up to date with his Kierkegaard research. Rafael will be sadly missed by all who knew him.

I am happy to report that all issues of the International Kierkegaard Newsletter are now available to anyone who would like to look at the issues prior to 1991. On the International Kierkegaard Newsletter index page at the bottom you will find the missing issues from 1979-1990 as pdf files. Please note (and this applies to all older material in issues of the Newsletter) that while these early issues contain valuable bibliographical and other information, some of the offers made and addresses given are now totally out of date. Thus some of the material is only of historical interest to Kierkegaard researchers. Changes are noted in subsequent issues of the Newsletter with up-to-date information appearing in the latest issues.

I am also happy to report that the Resources section of International Kierkegaard Information has been redone, and that in that section, under 'Some Danish & Other Text Resources', there is a section on 'Kierkegaard Quotations and Questions'. This section is being added to, and is based on questions that have come to me over the years. See: http://www.utas.edu.au/docs/humsoc/kierkegaard/resources/Kierkquotes.html

Many grateful thanks to the Malantschuk Memorial Foundation in Denmark for an award to the Kierkegaard website with its International Kierkegaard Newsletter. This will be an enormous help towards securing the future of this website. It will be marvellous if this project, which was started in 1979, can continue electronically to be of help to Kierkegaard students and scholars well into the 21st century.

Obituary: I am very sad to have to report the death of Kierkegaard scholar Roger Poole on November 21st this year. Roger was president of the Kierkegaard Society of the United Kingdom for a number of years and specialized in Kierkegaard studies from the time of his doctoral thesis (published as Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication in 1993). Recently he had started work as Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge on a Kierkegaard research project Kierkegaard After Postmodernism. My knowledge of Roger goes back through encounters at conferences, and especially meeting him when he came on study visits to the Kierkegaard Department at the University of Copenhagen. I think my last memory of him (apart from email contact) was at a Kierkegaard conference in England, when several of us gathered together for a chat after the papers. Roger will be much missed. A detailed obituary is to be found in the British paper The Independent: "Roger Poole: Polyglot literary theorist", November 28th, 2003. See also his website: http://www.divinity.cam.ac.uk/Kierkegaard/default.html

Copyright © Julia Watkin 2003. All rights reserved.
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