Volym 145, 2024

Mons Bissenbakker, Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Difference, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

“And yet I never, never became what I wanted”. Transgender resonance and recognition in Ahlgren’s/Benedictsson’s “From the Darkness”

In the reception of Ahlgren’s/Benedictsson’s authorship, transgender perspectives are alluded to but never unfolded. This article addresses this gap by offering a trans reading of the key short story “From the Darkness” (1888). It introduces trans theory as an independent literary field forming in part as a correction to feminist and queer theories, which have historically tended to overlook trans perspectives. The article engages with central discussions in trans literary research, presenting two reading strategies introduced by A. Eastwood: trans recognition and trans resonance. By arguing that trans theory provides a crucial contribution to literary scholarship, the article applies resonant and recognizing readings to “From the Darkness”. The resonant reading highlights the protagonist as a character who profoundly dissociates from women and femininity, yearning to be acknowledged among their male peers. The recognizing reading contextualizes the story within sexological discourses of the mid-1800s regarding sexual inversion, which the short story reflects upon. Suggesting transphobia as a main conflict of the story, the article offers new insights into the protagonist’s complex relationship with misogyny, which they seem to partially embrace. The analysis advocates for a deeper exploration of the transgender possibilities which have hitherto been under-examined in the readings of “From the Darkness” and in Ahlgren’s/Benedictsson’s broader authorship. 

Anna Blennow, University of Gothenburg 

Schering Rosenhane and Skogekär Bergbo. The unmasking of a 300-year-old poet pseudonym 

This article argues that Swedish diplomat and nobleman Schering Rosenhane (1609–1663) should be regarded as the author of the three poetic works in Swedish written by pseudonym Skogekär Bergbo (“Wood-loving Mountain-Dweller”) in the 17th century: Thet Swenska Språketz Klagemål (“The complaint of the Swedish Language”), Wenerid (a collection of 101 love sonnets to a lady with the same name), and Fyratijo små Wijsor (“Forty small songs”). Central to this identification are two previously unstudied poems in Swedish written in Schering Rosenhane’s hand in the Manuscript Department of Uppsala University Library. One of the poems is a song in 13 strophes, in which “Sylvander” complains about the coldness of his beloved “Fillis”. Inspired by the early 17th-century French Air de cour tradition, it is also influenced by German poet Martin Opitz, including four strophes translated from his “Hirten-Lied”. The other one is an incomplete poem in 12 strophes, a free translation of the famous passage in Torquato Tasso’s Aminta where the choir sings of the lost Golden Age. Both poems are dated to the 1630s, based on a palaeographic analysis. Through a close study of Rosenhane’s biography and literary production, as well as an analysis of language and style in the two poems compared with the oeuvre of Skogekär Bergbo, Rosenhane is presented as the most probable author candidate, instead of his younger brother Gustaf, to whom the authorship traditionally has been assigned. The article shows that Rosenhane, during a study trip to England and France in 1629–1631, as well as during long residencies on diplomatic missions abroad in Münster and Paris in the 1640s, had taken active part in learned networks and poetic circles and thus had come into close contact with Italian, French and German literature and poetry, providing him with the proficiency needed for being Skogekär Bergbo.

Anna Fredriksson, Uppsala University Library, associated to the Dept. of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University 

A Cabinet of Curious Stories – Johannes Schefferus’s Varia historia 

Varia historia is a hitherto unpublished text extant in an autograph manuscript by Johannes Schefferus (1621–1679) in Uppsala University Library MS X 292. The text consists of a collection of short stories about strange creatures, things and events which were seen, heard of, or were taking place mainly in the region of Uppland, Sweden, and its surroundings during a certain period of Schefferus’s life. Johannes Schefferus was professor of politics and eloquence at the Uppsala University, and the sources of these stories were most likely people he knew and other people who turned to him for advice concerning these peculiarities. The content of the stories is varied, but a common denominator is that the phenomena described appear strange and hard to explain. In collecting them Schefferus connects to an ancient method of storytelling and text composing as well as to the Early Modern practice of collecting and discussing exotic things in cabinets of curiosities, or Kunstkammern, popular among the learned during this time. 

In this article Johannes Schefferus’s Varia historia is presented for the first time in an edition and a translation from Latin to Swedish. The article contextualizes Varia historia and compares it to other texts that are related to Varia historia in various respects, texts which could have inspired Schefferus in his work with his text. The comparison suggests that whereas Varia historia would most appropriately be placed within the genre of Historical Miscellany, it has many traits that does not fit that genre, but instead other literary genres within which Schefferus had published other works before. The collection of odd stories also has much in common with the physical cabinet of curiosities. 

The article offers a possible reason for Schefferus to have composed Varia historia and especially suggests that its purpose is pedagogical, aiming at inspiring favourable intellectual processes in the minds of young students. Schefferus appears to use amazement as a means to make the youth reflect over the presence of God in the world, an amazement which can turn into curiosity and a drive to ask questions about wondrous things, to look at them with scrutiny and to finally gain knowledge about them.

Torbjörn Gustafsson Chorell, Department of Science and History of Ideas, Uppsala University 

The History of Violence and the New World: Selma Lagerlöf, Elin Wägner, and Eschatological-apocalyptic Consciousness of History 

In literature, art, and cultural debate, eschatological and apocalyptic notions of the end of the world are tools for understanding human existence that compete with the visions of progressive historical development and growth that dominate Western civilization. The Swedish authors Selma Lagerlöf, Nobel Prize laureate 1909, and Elin Wägner, a radical feminist who was elected a member of the Swedish Academy, offer two illustrative examples of this struggle with eschatological and apocalyptic notions of time in Bannlyst (1918) and Väckarklocka (1941) respectively. The texts present alternative histories in times of crises. Lagerlöf uses apocalyptic imaginary as part of a confrontation with the violence of the world, and Wägner tries out the utopian hope offered by an eschatologically informed philosophy of history about a soon-tocome shift when the violent contemporary world will be replaced by a new world. Both see the history of violence as the great restrainer of renewal and change.

Niclas Johansson, School of Education, Culture and Communication, Mälardalen University 

Cultural and Narrative Identity: Sami Said’s Väldigt sällan fin as Migration Literature 

Through a reading of Sami Said’s novel Väldigt sällan fin (Very rarely nice, 2012), this article explores how the concepts of narrative and cultural identity can be reconciled with each other in the context of migration literature which highlights transcultural processes of hybridity. The article begins with a theoretical discussion of the compatibility of theories of cultural and narrative identity which demonstrates how Bruner’s (1987) and Eakin’s (2008) accounts of narrative identity parallel Hall’s (1996) and Appiah’s (1994) accounts of cultural identity with respect to how they see personal narrative identity as grounded in a cultural narrative framework. Two theoretical dilemmas — regarding the primacy of subject or discourse and whether culture should be regarded as a subject position or a semiotic framework — are left pending, but it is suggested that a narrative hermeneutics in the Ricoeurian tradition allows for a practical resolution of these dilemmas. An interpretation of the novel along these lines is undertaken and demonstrates the complex interplay of personal and cultural identity in a many-faceted transcultural process. In conclusion, the article argues for the compatibility of narrative and cultural identity, that their intersection allows a more in-depth understanding of the personal experience of transcultural phenomena such as migration, suggests that key notions in transcultural and hybridity theory are sensibly adapted to a narrative-hermeneutic framework, and finally suggests a number of topics for future research.

Jerry Määttä, Department of History, Stockholm University. 

War, the Uncanny, and Dystopia in Jerker Virdborg’s Sommaren, syster (The Summer, Sister) 

Jerker Virdborg’s novel Sommaren, syster (2017, The Summer, Sister) depicts the siblings Anna and Erik’s attempts to escape from a Sweden afflicted by civil war. Given that Sweden has not experienced war in over two centuries, the purpose of this article is to examine how the novel portrays Sweden and war, and how this relates to some of the novel’s other central themes, such as children, childhood, and Swedish everyday life and nature. As the whole novel is narrated by Erik, a teenager with what seems to be autism, very little of the actual war scenario is conveyed, and it takes a relatively long time before he even outlines the story’s exact setting and plot. In the analysis of the depiction of the war, Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny (“das Unheimliche”) is used to try to explain some of the novel’s aesthetic devices, such as Erik’s descriptions of how Swedish daily life has been distorted in the war, but also vice versa, when glimpses of everyday life manifest amidst the conflict. The uncanny, in the sense of something familiar yet terrifying that has been repressed, could also be traced in the novel as a whole, as the nightmarish and chaotic civil war raging in the Swedish summer idyll represents the return of the possibility of war itself, which in Sweden in the 2010s remained collectively and culturally repressed. The analysis also highlights the significance of children, childhood, and Swedish nature, often contrasted with the war, and the article concludes with a discussion of how the novel relates to dystopias as well as to other genres, foregrounding utopian counterpoints such as sibling love and Erik’s childhood memories, but also a brief discussion of the novel as a commentary on the civil war in Syria and the refugee crisis. The article is part of Jerry Määttä’s project “Utopia Unsettled: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Swedish Dystopian Fiction”, funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Thorstein Norheim, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo 

Identity, Value, Honor. Dag Solstad’s Texts about the Football World Cup 

The material for the study is the six texts Dag Solstad has written about the football World Cup. In all these texts there is a close connection between identity, value and honor that so far appears unexplored. By carrying out such a new reading, the study shows how an honor project takes shape and unfolds both internally and externally. Internally, we meet a divided subject who promotes his view of football as a starting point for a personal honor based on various forms of honor. Externally, this appears as a textual act of communication from the author to his readers as a claim of personal authorial honor. Most of the study consists of providing a detailed analysis of this honor project exclusively linked to the football texts. Still, it seems to overlap with the honor project that I have previously derived from Solstad’s novels. Since this suggests that the differences between the football texts and the novels are smaller than previous research has assumed, the article ends with a discussion of what this means for Solstad’s writing and the view of its development. Among other things, it provides an argument that a dominant view in the reception, which is that Solstad rejected the working-class literature that he wrote in the 1970s and replaced it around 1980 with a return to the literature of the bourgeoisie, needs to be nuanced.

Ylva Perera, Åbo Akademi University 

“Writing from the Wound. Antifascism through Weakness, Suffering and Sympathetic Joy in the Prose of Mirjam Tuominen” 

The purpose of this article is to examine how the Finland-Swedish writer Mirjam Tuominen’s (1913–1967) way of writing about weakness and contempt for weakness in her essays and short stories from the 1930s and the 1940s can be read as an expression of antifascism. The study takes its point of departure in Harald Ofstad’s study of the Nazi mentality (1979), where he concludes that the very core of Nazism is constituted by contempt for weakness. Weakness is present in Tuominen’s prose in the way she centers physical and mental illness, poverty and people that in various ways could be defined as outcasts. Drawing on Alison Kafer’s work in crip theory (2013), the article treats weakness as a category constructed by not only material, but also political and relational, conditions. The main focus of the analysis is the short story “Anna Sten” (1939), but examples from all books published by Tuominen during the 1930s and 1940s are used. By drawing on 20th-century thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as recent advances in crip theory, the article shows how Tuominen exposes weakness as a touchstone of human existence rather than something to be eliminated. This in turn means that antifascist resistance relies on our ability to challenge our own contempt for weakness, a practice I have chosen to call “inner antifascism” (as opposed to the overt political actions of “outer antifascism”). While inner antifascism requires work on oneself, it depends on our ability to commiserate (medlidande, “to suffer with” in Swedish) with others as well as our ability to feel sympathetic joy. Tuominen herself coins the term medglädje (“to rejoice with” in Swedish) to illustrate how accepting weakness doesn’t need to mean an end to life, but rather a beginning.

Sofia Roberg, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University 

“The Form of the Snail. Gustaf Fröding’s ‘Nedanförmänskliga visor’ as Ecopoetry” 

In this article I turn to Gustaf Fröding’s cycle of poems “Nedanförmänskliga visor”, written in 1899–1900 and published posthumously in 1914, in order to reread one of the most prominent Swedish poets from a new perspective: that of ecocriticism and the adjacent fields of posthumanism and new materialism. More specifically, I argue that “Nedanförmänskliga visor” can be read as an instance of ecopoetry, but not without encountering certain problems related to anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. I show how an ecopoetic theory that emphasizes the ritual dimension of the lyric is apt to illuminate what is interesting with these poems from a contemporary point of view: while attempting to capture the style and form of different life forms, these poems also criticize the traditional humanist subject and view of language, substituting it with a post-Darwinist, vital materialist view on the relation between life forms and language. In this way, I also show how the notion of ecopoetry, and ecopoetics as a method, can be used to contextualize older works in new ways and how reading them anew also provides insights into contemporary concerns.

Lina Samuelsson, School of Education, Culture and Communication, Division of Language and Literature, Mälardalen University

Daniel Brodén, Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg

Jonas Ingvarsson, Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg

Victor Wåhlstrand, Chalmers University of Technology 

The Order of Criticism Visualized. Mixed Methods in the Study of Book Reviews 

This paper explores the interplay between data visualisation and close reading through a computational literary study of Swedish book reviews. Revisiting the dataset from literary scholar Lina Samuelsson’s study The Order of Criticism (Kritikens ordning: Svenska bokrecensioner 1906, 1956, 2006, (2013)), we integrate digital and traditional literary approaches, illustrating how different qualitative and quantitative methods can complement one another to further our understanding of literary criticism and its historically situated discursive practices. Employing a dialectical mixed methods approach and utilising data visualisations, our study identifies patterns that both confirm and challenge previous findings, prompting a re-examination of familiar texts and interpretations and, thus, showcasing the potential of computational tools to advance literary inquiry. Drawing on Victor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization, we also argue on a more theoretical level that these data visualisations do more than represent data – they disrupt automated perceptions, encouraging the renegotiation of familiar assumptions. Viewing literary criticism through a radically different lens does not necessarily yield entirely new discoveries but may uncover patterns and details that might otherwise remain unnoticed. We conclude by arguing that the methodological significance of data visualisations as tools for defamiliarization in our context lies in their ability to shift perspectives, offering multidimensional approaches to the study of literary criticism.

Linda Sandbæk, Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science, Oslo Metropolitan University 

Kjell Ivar Skjeringstad, Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science, Oslo Metropolitan University 

The Complexity of Trauma – Meetings between the Literary and the Clinical in Sara Stridsberg’s The Faculty of Dreams: Amendment to the Theory of Sexuality. 

The article explores the complexity of trauma in Sara Stridsberg’s The Faculty of Dreams: Amendment to the Theory of Sexuality (2006) based on theory of testimony. The novel and psychoanalytic theory both portray how traumatic experiences can lack words and memory and at the same time be present as displacements – for example in new stories. However, where theories focus on understanding the individual and psychological factors in trauma, The Faculty of Dreams shows how trauma cannot be decomposed into either events or effects and how the individual factors merge with the collective, political and structural. The article illuminates how the representation of silenced experiences can be a driving force for knowledge construction, in both the literary and the clinical projects. We argue that a dialogue between psychological and literary perspectives is mutually enriching.