During the last few decades, the concept of ”literacy” has had a growing impact on the vast fields of education. Although the uses of the concept are multifaceted and diverse, the hegemonic policy discourse as supported by the OECD treats literacy as an individual competence closely tied to the development of explicit reading strategies. This article examines what the concept of literacy means for literary studies in general and literature education in particular. We argue that there are reasons to critically reflect upon the effects
of invoking the concept of literacy in the field of literature education. With the aid of theorists like Rita Felski and Toril Moi, our main focus is to examine the risks of centering attention on the ”subject” (the student and his/her abilities) instead of the ”object” (in our case, the works of fiction). By turning to Gert Biesta and Emmanuel Lévinas, we argue that there is an educational value in acknowledging and appreciating what lies beyond the scope of the student’s immediate understanding.
En personlig essä om ämnesutvecklingen av skapande svenska till kreativt skrivande i Sverige, från ett sidospår till ämnet litteraturvetenskap, till ett eget ämnesområde och en integrerad pedagogisk och kvalitativ del av litteraturvetenskaplig utbildning och forskning. Som en parallell jämförelse tecknas också en bild av kvinnovetenskapens utveckling till genusvetenskap.
Writing for the plot? Some thoughts on academics as writers
In one of her books, bell hooks concludes: ”All academics write, but not all see themselves as writers.” This paradoxical dilemma is the starting point for this article, which wants to explore and challenge the notion of academic writing and knowledge production as rational, ungendered and disembodied intellectual activity. Against the backdrop of neoliberal research policies, with its accelerating demands for marketable and measurable results, it is perhaps more import than ever to claim, with Martha C. Nussbaums words, ”faculties of thought and imagination” as a crucial but non-measurable core of humanistic education and research.
It is argued in the article that the very naming of the practices and skills required for scholarly work affects our understanding of them in terms of professional competence and scientific authority. Furthermore, these normative thought patterns on what academic writing is; who performs it and how it is done often also reveals a hierarchized dichotomy between scientific and literary writing. What would happen if scholars in literary studies instead would ask themselves not only how, for instance, poetry can be theorized, but also how theory can be poetizised? Would it possible for the scholar to adopt narrative techniques such as travesty, metaphors and plot? Is it, in short, possible to not only read but also write for the plot? Thus, trying to locate the “in-betweens” and margins between genres as a possible site of dialogue, the article promotes a plea for a genre-transgressive, embodied and emotional view on the methodologies and epistemologies of academic writing.
Vi lever i ett multimedialt samhälle där skriftspråkets plats och funktion i den offentliga kommunikationen har decentrerats och dess tidigare roll som kommunikationsmediet framför andra nu tillsammans med bild, ljud och text i mer integrerande delar har förvandlats till ett bland flera kommunikationsmedier. Genom denna snabba utveckling av nya medier har skriftkulturen, och därmed också grunden och förutsättningen för skolämnet svenska alltmer kommit att utmanas. I denna ”new media age”, har skärmen delvis ersatt boken som det dominerande kommunikationsmediet. Men kommunikationsteknologier påverkar inte bara de sätt på vilka kunskap transmitteras, utan också innehållet i den kunskap som skapas, liksom de sätt på vilka undervisning organiseras.Bruket av IKT har inte vuxit fram i en skolkultur, utan utanför skolan. Därför finns det en inneboende spänning mellan IKT-stödd undervisning och traditionella sätt att arbeta i skolan. Introduktionen av IKT i en skolkontext kan ses som en förhandling mellan olika kulturer, där läraren ombeds att anpassa sin undervisning till en ”invaderande” kulturs behov, dvs. IKT-kulturen. Den starkaste faktorn när lärare bestämmer sig för att använda ny teknologi i undervisningen är de externa förväntningarna från skolledare och politiker, som tycks bli starkare ju längre undervisningserfarenhet en lärare har. Den svagaste faktorn rör datorn som ett verktyg för att utveckla och höja nivån på undervisningen och tycks minska i betydelse i takt med att lärare förvärvar undervisningserfarenheter. Skolämnen är i olika utsträckning “inbäddade” i IKT[vi]. Inom vissa skolämnen betraktas IKT som en sorts ”trojansk häst”, som står i konflikt med en djupt liggande ”ämnesgrammatik”. Studier i USA, Kanada och Storbritannien visar att föreställningen om ämneskulturer har betydelse när det gäller lärares och elevers användning av IKT. Samtidigt för ungdomar med sig populär- och mediekulturella kunskaper och erfarenheter in i klassrummet och de specifika skolämnena. De lever i en multimedial kultur utanför skolan och brukar en mängd olika medieteknologier för olika ändamål och i olika kommunikativa situationer, där bilden, musiken och texten intar en framträdande plats, dvs. en “screen culture” eller ”media ecology ”.Bruket av ny teknik och nya medier i skolan tycks leda till en pedagogisk förändring i motsats till vad exempelvis Cuban hävdar. Överlappande kulturer och ”ownership” leder till förändrade lärar- och elevroller. Medieteknologin fungerar som en ”fulcrum”, dvs. som en sorts vändpunkt, tänkt som ett resultat inte av en plötslig insikt, utan som resultatet av en process, eller omorientering i den pedagogiska praktiken. Likt reminiscenser från ett gammalt samhälle tycks en sorts teknikfientlighet ligga inbäddad i den pedagogiska diskursen och skolans olika ämnesparadigm. Det finns en tendens till att uppfatta det som har med ny teknik och nya medier att göra som något virtuellt och därmed inte verkligt, dvs. som en verklighetsförlust.
Den här artikeln tar sin utgångspunkt i skolämnet svenska, som i allt högre grad står under inflytande av en digital medie- och skärmkultur och ställer frågan om vad detta har för betydelse för ämnets (1) innehåll och (2) undervisningsformer.
The Swedish writer Sara Lidmann (1923-2004) wrote Jag och min son ("I and My Son") after a brief stint in apartheid's South Africa in 1960-61, from where she was expelled for a violation of the Immorality Act. Based on a close, interrelated study of her diary, her letters and the two manuscripts (first published in 1961 and revised and re-published in 1963), this essay ("'To outlive the slave in me': Postcolonial Perspectives on Sara Lidman in Apartheid's South Africa 1960-1961") examines the colonial boundary crisis of the Self. The major protagonists in the novel(s) embody variously aspects of the writer's angst as it developed in the Johannesburg colonial setting of persecuted ANC members, the elite of the local Swedish community, and the pressure of her anticolonial frustrations. Sexuality is a major element in the "nervous condition" that characterizes the fragmented and confusing conceptualization of the novel. Its extensive rewriting was an attempt at strengthening its ideological, anti-imperial modus, pushing the novel into the environs of the postcolonial allegory such as in such texts as Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) and Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1974). A second self-castigating theme, this essay claims, is the impact of the religious background of the author as born into -- but never at peace with -- strong evangelical and paternal practices. 'Outliving the slave' (a quote from one of her letters) in the title of the essay proposes a Fanonian reading of the circulatory and traumatizing notion of rebellion (against Apartheid) and submission (to it). The third theme involves the idealization of the child that also involves a colonial cul-de-sac of self-positioning expressed both in the novel and the writer's attempts at adopting an African child (never realized).
Sara Lidman wrote her second autobiographical African novel, Med fem diamanter ("With Five Diamonds"), during a prolonged sojourn in Kenya (1962-1963) where she first lived in Kisumu, in the Nyanza province, near Lake Victoria, before moving to Njeri in Gikuyland. She was accompanied by Wambui Njonjo, the country's first school inspector. The Njonjo family was close to the Kenyattas. The question in the title of the essay, “Who is the Thief? Sara Lidman in Postcolonial Kenya?”, points at the post-colonial threshold dilemma of Kenyans being both perpatrators and victims of their own fate, freed from the colonial bonds but reintroduced to economic forms of western dependence. I examine two aspects of her allegorical chronicling of Kenya 1958-1963 and the symbolic killing of Thiongo, the homosexual, by his brother Wachira, the boy pining in the servitude of both Gikuyu patriarchy and the greed of western capitalism. The two aspects relate to the dynamics and ambivalence of power. In the first section I demonstrate how 'stealing' – both as an act of aggression and one of liberation – is manifested in cultural and linguistic artefacts, in the textures of women's kangas, in a Luo legend, in Christian mission. As a postcolonial writer Lidman is unique for her time in transliterating and contextualizing (not translating) Gikuyu and Kiswahili words, proverbs and stories. In the second section I examine how 'love' or the idealization of 'love', heterosexual and homosexual, deteriorates under the pressure of 'thieving'. In Lidman's ideal world androgynity is central. Med fem diamanter is a Kenyan novel written in Swedish.
While Lars Norén's confrontational and self-exposing En dramatikers dagbok (A Dramatists Journal, 2008) already has spurred discussions on the nature of confession in today's mediatised literary public sphere, less has been said about the aesthetic project of the journal. By tracing this project back to Norén's poetry of the 1960s as well as by comparing it to works by Lyn Hejinian and Kenneth Goldsmith, a continual dialectic between subjectivity and textuality is outlined. Drawing upon Hal Foster's ideas on "the return of the real" as well as on Simone Weil's notion of "detatchment", the article consequently argues that the journal's subject is aestheticized to the point of negation by means of a performative process simultaneously rendering it anew in the realm of public debate.
Queer Desires: Fan Fiction about Vampires and Slayers
In this article we analyze a selection of fan fiction stories in which fans engage in an intertextual dialogue with a source text. As an Internet-published literary form, fan fiction (or fanfic) is fairly new and the relatively democratic means of publication have meant a dramatically increased production. However, the intertextual dialogue with the source text reveals connections between fanfic and previous forms of rewritings. It is therefore rather in terms of content that fan fiction can be said to represent new strategies when negotiating the source material.
The six fanfics chosen for the analyses are of the slash and femslash varieties in which same-sex couples who are not romantically or sexually linked in the source text are paired. The fanfics take as their starting points Joss Whedon’s tv-series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and J. R. Ward’s romantic novels in the Black Dagger Brotherhood-series. Authors of femslash pair the two Slayers Buffy and Faith and authors of slash engage the characters Vishous and Butch in a homoerotic relationship. Aside from analyzing examples of the fanfic form, the selection of stories based on source texts centering on vampires means an opportunity to investigate the function of this literary trope. Its attraction for fanfic authors can be said to stem from the figure’s inherent possibilities of representing alternative, queer sexualities.
By analyzing narrative strategies and selected themes we argue that the (fem)slash texts illustrate negotiations both with genre and gender conventions of the source texts and a resistance to the heteronormative structures of today’s popular culture.
This article is tracing a newspaper poem, originally published in 1795 in the section for lost and found, and reprinted repeatedly in newspapers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The poem describes a girl who has lost a pouch with her sewing kit on a walk through Stockholm. The one who returns it is promised two sugar breads and a kiss as a reward. It was published anonymously but Anna Maria Lenngren was later identified as the author. Following the poem from paper to paper reveals a network of text reuse where texts were borrowed, edited and recontextualized. Several papers all around Sweden published the verse as an anonymous advertisement from 1837 to 1868. Yet, among other things, the editors also changed the place name mentioned in the poem to make it seem as if it was written by a local girl. Another version of the text was widely circulated in papers from 1887 to 1917. This version was truer to the original wording of the poem, but it was published along with an anecdote identifying Lenngren herself as the girl in the text, making it part of her own marriage proposal. This time the poem was placed in the section for humorous titbits, among gossip and funny stories. The different versions of the poem illustrate how newspapers could function as a medium for literature in the nineteenth century. The practice of text reuse had the potential of maximizing the readership but could also mean that authors lost control over their words. When poems became “fugitive verses” in the network of newspapers, they entered a fluid state where authorships were destabilized and texts were recontextualized to fit on the newspaper page.
Essän tar ett grepp om nymaterialistisk teori i relation till litteraturvetenskap. Nymaterialismens mest inflytelserika företrädare Karen Barad menar att språket fått för mycket makt på materiens bekostnad. Vad betyder ett sådant uttalande för litteraturvetenskapen? I denna essä vänder och vrider jag på motsättningar och konflikter som kan uppstå när litteraturvetare vill använda nymaterialistisk teori för att förstå litteratur. Jag menar att det finns inneboende problem i en sådan ansats som litteraturvetare inte får förringa. Samtidigt är dessa problem inte heller skäl nog att sluta försöka teoretisera relationen mellan materia och språk.
bob hund could be called a «post-rock band» that investigates what it really means to be a rock band – or, as they call themselves: a pop orchestra. How do you put together the given components drum, bass, guitar and keyboard in constellations that make something new appear? In trying to respond to this question, this article points to bob hund’s roots in modernist avant-garde aesthetics, and examines what such winding connections between different traditions might mean. Aesthetic practices such as decontextualization, irony, anacoluthon wordplay, and lists change when they are used in new and different historical contexts. If high modernism was reduced to form, and Duchampian neodadaism to lifestyle choices, then bob hund opens new possibilities for aesthetic practices in today's anthropocenic hypercapitalism.
This article explores novels from the 60’s and 70’s, targeted primarily towards children in the so-called intermediate age (age 9–12), by Swedish author Kerstin Thorvall. Thorvall was both a part of, and a forerunner to, the rejuvenation of children’s literature that took place in the 1960’s in Sweden – a time when books written for young boys and girls became known as ”youth literature”. This article argues that one of Thorvall’s contributions to this rejuvenation concerned her portrayal of boys and their relation to the mother, the family and the home. Boys have traditionally been depicted in outdoor environments associated with adventure: for instance, the woods, the water or in city neighbourhoods. Magnus Öhrn has classified such locations as ”boyhood territory”. Thorvall effectively re-situated this territory indoors – in the apartment or in the house. In Thorvall’s books, the boy’s subjectivity is shaped in relation to his mother and other intimate relations within the home. Whereas the individuation process for boys traditionally entails dissociation from the mother, in Thorvalls novels, the boy’s identity formation is relational, dependent and intertwined with relations within the home. Utilising the Bakhtinian chronotope as an analytical tool, the article explores how the plot constructs this identity formation both spatially and emotionally. Thorvall makes use of the home in a very concrete manner – through the boy’s movements between kitchen, hall and bedroom. The article argues that by placing boys in what has traditionally been regarded as “girlhood territory” Thorvall effectively revises the “boy book” genre. Instead of introducing girl characters into the adventures of the boy book, she exposes boy characters to the realism of traditionally “female” domestic settings.
Recension av avhandlingen Likt ett brustet halleluja. Trons och tvivlets tematik i Christine Falkenlands prosa av Anna Clara Törnqvist
In 1897 Samuel August Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel left Svalbard in a hydrogen balloon with the aim of sailing across the Arctic, claim the North Pole by dropping a buoy and continue on to the North American mainland. The men were never heard from again, and 33 years later, their bodies were found on Kvitöja, or White Island, in the Svalbard archipelago. The expedition is surrounded by both documentary and fictive texts, among them the neglected novel Den hemlighetsfulla nordpolsön (The Mysterious North Pole Island) by Vidar Berge. Published in 1902, the novel takes its starting point in the actual balloon ascent, but from there veers into the speculative. After a few days in the air, Berge’s fictional characters Anders, Sindberg and Wænckel are forced down onto a green island in the open polar sea where they encounter Viking descendants and prehistoric animals in a series of adventures. Designating the novel as an example of speculative fiction, I examine how the lack of facts about the actual expedition opens for hypothetical scenarios that Berge explains via scientific or pseudoscientific discussions. I also analyze how speculative elements are influenced by conceptions of the Arctic that circulated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
"Poets versus Actors Reading Poetry on Swedish Radio 2020–2021"
Following the rise of the poet as the principal performer of his or her own work, in the second half of the 20th century, actors have been criticized for performing poetry as if acting on stage, or for focusing too much on conveying the lyric I. This primarily quantitative study investigates what prosodic differences there are between poets and actors reading poetry. The material consists of 276 readings from the Swedish public radio program Dagens dikt (The Daily Poem), from 2020 and 2021. A set of prosodic measures are produced for each recording with computational aid, and the groups are compared by using descriptive statistics. The differences found in terms of tempo and pausal patterns, though small, suggest that the actors read in a conventionally poetic, expressive style, while the poets are closer to a style typical of prose reading and conversational speech; this might be connected to differences between their respective repertoire – the poets reading newer, longer, and possibly more narrative texts. When it comes to pitch, there are more substantial differences: the poets are more monotonous and their tonal patterns more predictable, indicating a formal, less expressive style. These traits are associated with the highly stylized vocal cliché Poet Voice, which in turn is connected to poetological shifts in the last few decades. In both groups, however, younger individuals (born 1970 or later) and women, respectively, are the more monotonous and predictable; this might suggest a sociolinguistic trend not limited to poetry. Qualitative, close listening to a selection of readings largely confirms the findings of the quantitative investigation. While the frequently idiosyncratic poets tend to highlight form, such as rhythm and tonal repetitions, the actors rather try to convey the content of the poem, in accordance with prosodical and performative conventions.
Norrland as Identity and Periphery
In this article I discuss the attempt, on the part of Swedish authors Pelle Molin, Olof Högberg and Gustav Hedenvind-Eriksson, to construct a Norrlandic identity around the turn of the twentieth century. Although Norrland is a part of Sweden, it has often been looked upon as something "other". Historically, there is a long tradition of viewing Norrland as a periphery, and as the great unknown. From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Norrland first became a concept to the rest of Sweden, it was as region lacking an identity of its own. Norrland was regarded as an object for the central power of Sweden, a view that might be labelled "colonial". Norrland was fundamentally conceived of as exotic "nature" – that is, as the opposite of culture – due to the fact that it supplied the natural resources which helped to create wealth in Sweden: the forests, the ore fields, and hydropower. The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th witnessed attempts to construct another Norrland, with a history and a cultural identity of its own. It is particularly in fiction that this different Norrland begins to come into being.
Idéer om det sköna och det fula är intimt förknippade med ideologiska praktiker. En högst aktuell arena för sådana praktiker är offentliga diskurser om "utanförskap", "knark" och "förort". Individer som förknippas med dessa samhällsproblem riskerar stigmatiseras, som fula i ordets bredaste bemärkelse. Denna artikel är en analys av hur fulhet tar sig i uttryck i den svenska musikgruppen Original Dunder Zubbis (ODZ), en rap-grupp som förknippas med dessa problem.
Analysen visar att ODZ gör bruk av teman kopplade till fulhet på sätt som konstituerar en kollektivitet. Denna kollektivitet är i viss utsträckning polyfonisk i den bachtinska bemärkelsen av begreppet. Men ODZ använder verbala, audiella och visuella tekniker på sätt som skapar en kollektivitet utan urskiljbara och avgränsningsbara individuella röster och perspektiv. Denna "lallande polyfoni" fungerar som ett sätt att göra motstånd mot stigmatiserande ideologiska praktiker. När den officiella kulturens auktoriteter interpellerar ODZ som missbrukare, kriminella och exkluderade bjuder musiken inte på något subjekt som kan ställa till svars.