Volume 133, 2012

The Alienated Form of Nature: The Critique of Imitation and Aesthetic Knowing in the young Goethe's Aesthetic Writings

This essay examines the transformation of the concept of mimesis (imitation, Nachahmung der Natur) in the theoretical writings of the young Johann Wolfgang Goethe and its implications for the conception of aesthetic knowing. The Sturm und Drang period in general and Goethe, the period's most influential writer, in particular are usually regarded as skeptical about or even hostile to the classicist ideal of imitation. In this essay I argue that Goethe's conception of mimesis is closely related to his idea that nature is not immediately represented in art. Imitation of nature is the result of a process of alienation, which transforms nature into an aesthetic object. It is only in this transformed state, as "inner form" (innere Form), that nature is available to man. Furthermore, this notion of imitation as alienation points to the profound change that epitomizes epistemology in the late eighteenth century, that is, the transition from the classical episteme of representation to the modern, organic episteme.

Ljubica Miočević, Bilder från Boo. Karl August Nicander – En Magus i Spådomskonsten (Images from Boo. Karl August Nicander – A Magus in Soothsaying)

The essay describes a deck of playing cards with a short handwritten inscription by the Swedish poet Karl August Nicander (1799–1839). The deck is dated 1 October 1834 at the Boo estate, where Nicander was staying in the home of his friend Hugo Hamilton. It is dedicated to a female acquaintance, one of Hugo's stepsisters, upon the occasion of her leaving Boo and returning home. Since there are no indications of any particularly warm feelings between Nicander and the woman, the versified deck should be considered as an unusual instance of occasional poetry functioning as a prestigious gift. The poet refers to himself as “A Magus in Soothsaying," and the inscriptions on the cards were meant to be used during fortune-telling games. The tone is playful and light, as the games were more a pastime than serious divination.

Interior scenes of the life at Boo are described, with particular attention given to games, interest in the supernatural (such as divination and ghost stories), and the occasional poetry; the different types of games mentioned include card games, patience, card tricks, and chess. Nicander's position as a destitute poet living in an aristocratic household is touched upon. His letters and almanacs give interesting examples of occasions when he was expected to deliver verse during birthday celebrations for members of the household at Boo. The epithet ‘society poet' that has sometimes been used to describe Nicander's strategies in the literary field is thus actualized.

Thematically, the inscriptions on the cards are discussed against the background of the rich flora of playing instructions and soothsaying games that flooded the Swedish market in the early nineteenth century. The popularity of card motifs in Romantic literature is discussed.

A deck of cards is also a material object in which the pictorial element dominates. The interplay of the text and images on Nicander's deck is analysed; the poet's persistent interest in printing techniques and the materiality of manuscripts are contextualized. A deck of cards with playful, semi-serious occult inscriptions by the hand of a Romantic poet is indeed an unusual object, but at the same time it embodies themes and ideologies typical of its time.

Key words: Karl August Nicander, playing cards, pastime, soothsaying, occasional poetry, Romanticism.

"'Se kvinnorna'. Marika Stiernstedt, Hjalmar Söderberg and the gender-political context at the beginning of the 20th century"

This study discusses the concept of intertextuality by examining Martin Bircks ungdom (1901) and Doktor Glas (1906) by Hjalmar Söderberg and Lilas äktenskap (1910) by Marika Stiernstedt in the context of early 20th century gender-political discussion. Stiernstedt and Söderberg raise questions about sex, gender, love, sexuality and morality against a backdrop of works such as Lifslinjer I (1903) by Ellen Key, Ny kärlek. En bok för mogna andar (1902) by Elisabeth Dauthenday (1902) and to some extent Fyra böcker om Kristi efterföljelse (1894) by Thomas a Kempis. Stiernstedt and Söderberg show in their literary work that the contemporary gender-political discussion was characterized by security and perplexity. The female protagonists in their novels seem to be trapped in what Birgitta Holm calls “the no man's land of feminine desire", that is, in a borderland between an increasingly loosened Victorian ideal woman and an even more vague idea of the New Woman. However, although these three women live under entirely different conditions, they can still be regarded as forerunners to the New Woman.

Rhythm and Meaning. An Analysis of Ingemar Gustafssons Poem "Förföljd av mitten" ("Persecuted by the Centre") (Rytm och betydelse. En analys av Ingemar Gustafsons diktsvit "Förföljd av Mitten")

This article is part of a larger project aiming at a theory and a method for understanding aesthetic rhythm. Rhythm supplies meaning, but it might be difficult to decide exactly what meaning and how the integration of form and meaning takes place. In this article, I demonstrate a method for investigating rhythm with the help of a poem by Ingemar Gustafson, "Förföljd av mitten" ["Persecuted by the Centre"] (1956).

A poem might be understood as a row of patterns or gestalts, like phrase patterns and lines. These patterns are, I would suggest, signified by balance and direction. Rhythm in poetry could be described as a dialectic process of perceived direction and perceived balance, or in other words, as a cooperation between movement and rest.

A definition like this has its theoretical base in cognitive poetics and the recent development of cognitive metrics.

Till Tabbas (To Tabas, 1959) is Finnish-Swedish author Willy Kyrklund's (1921-2009) account of a journey through Iran in the 1950s. While ostensibly the object of Kyrklund's text is modern Iran and early Islamic Persia, on an ideational level To Tabbas explores existential issues that are most readily associated with certain intellectual environments in post-war Europe. In one sense, the Persian "Orient" is to Kyrklund an archive of texts and images, which he uses in a discussion about what he sees as the terms of human existence. Kyrklund discusses the terms of human existence by emphasising the perceived sameness between the modern Western subject and the Persian Muslim and the masters of Sufi poetry. He uses the concept of "man" to refer to the common ground that he imagines exists between them. However, as this essay shows, "man" as an abstract category functions as a placeholder for the post-war European male intel­lectual, desperate in his longing for a higher purpose, and certain that no such higher purpose exists. This tendency of semantic ambiguity is discussed from a postcolonial perspective in the last section of this article.

Till Tabbas (To Tabas, 1959) is Finnish-Swedish author Willy Kyrklund's (1921-2009) account of a journey through Iran in the 1950s. While ostensibly the object of Kyrklund's text is modern Iran and early Islamic Persia, on an ideational level To Tabbas explores existential issues that are most readily associated with certain intellectual environments in post-war Europe. In one sense, the Persian "Orient" is to Kyrklund an archive of texts and images, which he uses in a discussion about what he sees as the terms of human existence. Kyrklund discusses the terms of human existence by emphasising the perceived sameness between the modern Western subject and the Persian Muslim and the masters of Sufi poetry. He uses the concept of "man" to refer to the common ground that he imagines exists between them. However, as this essay shows, "man" as an abstract category functions as a placeholder for the post-war European male intel­lectual, desperate in his longing for a higher purpose, and certain that no such higher purpose exists. This tendency of semantic ambiguity is discussed from a postcolonial perspective in the last section of this article.

"The Writing of Childhood and the Childhood of Writing: Nathalie Sarraute and Autobiography"

This article deals with the autobiographical childhood narrative Enfance (1983) written by Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999). More specifically, it attempts to analyze the two directions Sarraute criticism took when assessing this particular work in relation to the reading of it as the story of becoming a writer. On the one hand, the narrative was seen as the beginning of something new in Sarraute's writing, on the other as a sophisticated continuation of her exploration of tropisms. Some critics contend that the writing performed by the childhood "I" of the narrative should be seen as the first steps towards becoming a writer, while others aim to show how the child's experiences of writing function as counter examples of how to write according to Sarraute, and thus could not be seen as representing a vocational story. The aim of this article is to show that Sarraute's childhood narrative is the story of un-learning how to write traditionally and an intricate reflection on the function and conception of autobiographical writing.