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- Hermansson, Gunilla, 1974
(författare)
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À propos Rosa Luxemburg : Nordiske modernister tolker revolutionens og avantgardens grænser
- 2016
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Ingår i: Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap. - 1104-0556. ; 46:3-4, s. 5-24
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Staging oneself as an avant-garde or modernist writer during the inter-war period involved precarious negotiations between the national, regional (in this case the Nordic) and international roles and positions. But these were also influenced by the notion that avant-garde art and aesthetics depended on violence, a violence which was more often than not encoded as masculine. For this reason, literary images of the woman revolutionary are particularly revealing for the issues and ideas at stake. This article views two interpretations of Rosa Luxemburg by Emil Bønnelycke and Hagar Olsson as part of a larger pattern concerning the dynamics between cultural centres and peripheries as well as the connection between avant-garde aesthetics and violence. When Emil Bønnelycke first read his Rosa Luxemburg. Prosalyrisk Symphoni pathêtique in memoriam in Februart 1919, he chocked and excited the audience by drawing a revolver firing it at the cealing at the moment of Luxemburg’s death. Interestingly enough, Bønnelycke’s Luxemburg is represented in two ways: one is the weak woman who is entirely directed towards the masculine power and hatred which she finds embodied in Liebknecht. The other Luxemburg is presented in stylized passages that function as a leitmotiv in the short work. Here she is a young girl with a child’s holy passion and a, as of yet, passive defiance against the evils she has witnessed. Luxemburg is de-erotizied in both versions; but whereas the middle-aged woman painfully exhibits her impotence, the young girl is invested with a power of resistance, which is nonetheless non-acute. This appears to be Bønnelycke’s way of restoring gender roles without completely disarming the energy of revolution which he needed in order to be able to represent the ”European panic” in Denmark, under relatively safe conditions. In the inter-war period, Hagar Olsson paradoxically interpreted Finland as a neutral, Nordic country, out of contact with the Euopean war and revolutions. Instead, she was inspired from her experiences of the communist uprising in Estonia 1924, publishing her own translation of a poem dedicated to Luxemburg by a young communist poet, Ida Meerits. The context was an article from 1925 dedicated to a new type of poet: the singing revolutionary. Olsson singled out the word flyttfåglar (”migratory birds”) from the poem and used it to reflect on the borders of art and revolution, a theme she developed in other articles as well. She wrote that, in their internationalism, the new, engaged poets were like migratory birds. But her discussions also concerned the violence of revolution and the avant-garde geography as a power play between dominating and dominated literatures. The figure of the women revolutionary in Olsson’s dramas, S.O.S. (1928) and Det blåa undret (The Blue Wonder, 1932), and in the photo-novel På Kanaanexpressen (On the Canaan Express, 1929) further highlights the complex ways in which Olsson combined the problem of violence, avant-garde aesthetics and gender in her inter-war work.
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| 2. |
- Hermansson, Gunilla, 1974
(författare)
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Kort, knapp eller kantig? Något om expressionism och prosa i Norden 1910-1930
- 2013
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Ingår i: Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap. - 1104-0556. ; 2013:2, s. 39-48
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Short, Terse or Angular? Notes on Expressionism and Prose in the Nordic Countries 1910–1930 With Pär Lagerkvist’s earliest collections of short prose, Motiv (1914) and Järn och människor (1915) as a point of reference, the article discusses ”shortness” in relation to the problems of defining expressionist prose. Most researchers agree that expressionist prose is, first and foremost, short, with the argument that the expressionist intensity or tendency towards abstraction works against a narrative pace. However, in examining how authors critically concerned with expressionism in Germany, as well as in the Nordic countries, create and imagine an expressionist or modern prose, it becomes obvious that shortness is not a dominant requirement or idea. It is at least equally important to note that authors often strive to achieve inter-medial effects: aspiring, for instance, to the angularity, hardness and abstraction of cubist art, or to the tempo and technique of modern film. It also becomes evident that the term ”expressionist” needs to be more carefully applied in the Nordic than in the German context, in order to be meaningful. In the end, the concept of ”shortness” per se, does not aid in the definition of expressionist prose. Moreover, it cannot be concluded that Nordic authors utilize short forms in their literary experiments more consistently than they use longer forms. However, it is apparent that Lagerkvist is extremely attentive to the different effects of reducing or expanding his texts, particularly in order to let his readers see and see beyond the ”angularity” of his art.
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| 3. |
- Hermansson, Gunilla, 1974
(författare)
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"Vårvindar friska" och världen
- 2018
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Ingår i: Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap. - 1104-0556. ; 2018:1-2, s. 34-45
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- With a point of departure in a specific case of poetry reception the article aims to nuance the contemporary discussions of world literature, by paying attention to song performances, anthologies and the digital archive as central media for transnational circulation of poetry in a historical perspective. The article examines the national and international reception of the poem, or song lyrics known as “Vårvindar friska” (1828, Fresh Spring Breezes) by the Swedish romantic poet Julia Nyberg (pseud. Euphrosyne). Nyberg used a traditional melody when composing her text and it was further adjusted to a specific image of the Nordic traditional song when it was included in the Swedish canon. The reception history shows how the song became associated with Swedishness and on that account subjected to a whole range of ideological and commercial agendas. Today, several interpretations and performances of the song are available on YouTube, and the user comments demonstrate that they do generates interest for the words, including the original, full text. The case of “Vårvindar friska” also provides an opportunity to highlight central types of media through which world literature has been envisioned during two formative periods. In the second half of the nineteenth century, poetry anthologies were considered important media for the collection and dissemination of world literature. In our own century, YouTube seems to have taken over some of these tasks and expectations which also relate to the more general question of world literature in a digital age. The obvious differences notwithstanding, the presence (or non-presence) of “Vårvindar friska” and other Swedish romantic poetry in translation anthologies and in the YouTube archive, point out some similar features, such as the principles of recycling and remediation and identity formation as a driving force. The two reception contexts shed light on each other as well as further complicate our understanding of the dynamics between availability and impact on a world-wide scale.
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