Biographer and Critic Morten Høi Jensen, Eugene Lang and NSSR Alum, Values His New School Experience
Studying at The New School, writer and critic Morten Høi Jensen, Literary Studies ’11 and Liberal Studies ’13, made connections with professors who helped land him internships at Bookforum and New Directions Publishing, meet his favorite writers and editors, and write his first book.
That book, “The Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen,” a biography of the little known, but hugely influential 19th century Danish prose writer, emerged from a thesis Jensen penned with the support of his advisor, Professor of Culture and Media Noah Isenberg.
“I was very fortunate to have a number of very excellent and inspiring professors at The New School, many of whom I’m still in touch with,” says the Eugene Lang College and New School for Social Research graduate. “Additionally, I’ve always found it inspiring to have attended a school that has counted Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, and Hermann Broch among its various guest speakers and professors.”
Jensen is also a critic whose reviews of books by James Woods, C.E. Morgan, and Rachel Cusk have appeared in notable publications like the L.A. Review of Books, Bookforum, The New Republic, and others.
“I’m a great admirer of the Anglo-American tradition of literary journalism as practiced by the likes of Virginia Woolf, V. S. Pritchett, and Elizabeth Hardwick, literary criticism that is itself highly literary and impressionistic rather than solemnly academic,” says Jensen. “It is the kind of criticism you encounter in magazines and newspapers rather than scholarly journals. It’s a tradition that means a lot to me.”