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- Knutsen, Karen Patrick, 1954-
(författare)
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Reciprocal Haunting : Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Pat Barker’s fictional account of the Great War, The Regeneration Trilogy, completed in 1995, is considered to be her most important work to date and has captured the imagination of the reading public as well as attracting considerable scholarly attention. Although the trilogy appears to be written in the realistic style of the traditional historical novel, Barker approaches the past with certain preoccupations from 1990s Britain and rewrites the past as seen through these contemporary lenses. Consequently, the trilogy illustrates not only how the past returns to haunt the present, but also how the present reciprocally haunts perceptions of the past. The haunting quality of the trilogy is developed through an extensive, intricate pattern of intertextuality. This reciprocal haunting at times breaks the realistic framework of the narrative, giving rise to anachronisms. This study offers a reading of trauma, class, gender and psychology as thematic areas where intertexts are activated, allowing Barker to revise and re-accentuate stories of the past. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue, it focuses on the trilogy as an interactive link in an intertextual chain of communication about the Great War. Received versions of history are confirmed, expanded on and sometimes questioned. What is innovative about the trilogy is how Barker incorporates discursive formations not only from the Great War period, but from the whole twentieth century. The Great War is regenerated and transformed as it passes from one dialogic context to another. My reading shows that the trilogy presents social structures from different historical epochs through dialogism and diachronicity, making the present-day matrices of power and knowledge that continue to surround, determine and limit people’s lives highly visible. The Regeneration Trilogy regenerates the past, simultaneously confirming Barker’s claim that the historical novel can also be “a backdoor into the present”.
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Collective Traumas : Memories of War and Conflict in 20th-Century Europe
- 2007
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- Collective Traumas is about the traumatic European history of the 20th century - war, genocide, dictatorship, ethnic cleansing - and how individuals, communities and nations have dealt with their dark past through remembrance, historiography and legal settlements. Memories, and especially collective memories, serve as foundations for national identities and are politically charged. Regardless whether memory is used to support or to challenge established ideologies, it is inevitably subject to political tensions. Consequently, memory, history and amnesia tend to be used and abused for different political and ideological purposes. From the perspectives of historical, literary and visual studies the essays focus on how the experiences of war and profound conflict have been represented and remembered in different national cultures and communities. This volume is a vital contribution to memory studies and trauma theory. Collective Traumas is a result of the multi-disciplinary research project on Memory Culture that was initiated in 2002 at Karlstad University, Sweden.
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- Grimbeek, Marinette, 1982-
(författare)
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Margaret Atwood's Environmentalism : Apocalypse and Satire in the MaddAddam Trilogy
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study considers the way in which Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic MaddAddam Trilogy functions as an environmental project. The main focus is on how the three novels, Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013), simultaneously draw on and destabilise the apocalypticism inherent in so much environmental discourse, primarily through the use of satire. The trilogy is securely anchored in the concerns of contemporary readers, and transposition of the action to the near future is integral to Atwood’s environmental project: attention is focussed on the present causes of anticipated environmental catastrophe, which readers implicitly are implored to avoid. Atwood’s environmentalism is performed in the interplay between her literary stature, the equivocal content of her work, and the irreverence with which she metaleptically blurs distinctions between fact and fiction, art and commodity, and activism and aesthetics. Whereas the satiric mode serves as a way of avoiding some of the limitations of apocalyptic thinking by maintaining and even creating complexity, it also renders the entire project ambiguous. Uncertainty about the exact environmental injunction presented in the trilogy creates doubts about the degree to which Atwood’s extradiegetic environmental activism should be taken seriously, or conversely. Storytelling is foregrounded in all three novels, and through its concurrent critique of and reliance on market forces and the political potential of art, the MaddAddam Trilogy demonstrates that there is no external position from which the imagination can perform environmentalist miracles. As such, Atwood’s environmental project furthers a profoundly ecological understanding of the world.
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- Holmgren Troy, Maria, 1962-
(författare)
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Adapting Ideologies : Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital and Matt Reeves’s Let Me In
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper will draw on Linda Hutcheon’s account in A Theory of Adaptation (2013) of “transculturating” and “transcultural adaptations” in examining how two American adaptations of Nordic Gothic texts – Stephen King’s TV series Kingdom Hospital (2004) and Matt Reeves’s movie Let Me In (2010) – change what Hutcheon calls the “ideological valences” of the adapted texts: Lars von Trier’s Danish TV series Riget (1994, 1997) and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Swedish novel Låt den rätte komma in (2004) and its subsequent 2008 Swedish film adaptation. All of these narratives introduce ghosts and/or vampires into actually existing and, to a large extent, realistically depicted late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century Scandinavian and American environments. However, I will argue that there are significant ideological differences between the Nordic and the American texts, which have an impact on both the aesthetics and the effects of these Gothic or horror narratives.
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| 9. |
- Holmgren Troy, Maria, 1962-
(författare)
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Adapting Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred in the Twenty-First Century
- 2023
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Academic work on Octavia E. Butler’s speculative fiction has increased exponentially since the 1990s, and Butler is a towering presence in the multidisciplinary field termed Afrofuturism. A fairly new development regarding Butler’s oeuvre – her first novel Patternmaster was published in 1976, her last, Fledgling, in 2005 – is the interest in adapting her novels to different media. In the past five years, there have been two graphic novel adaptations: Kindred (2017) and Parable of the Sower (2021); and Parable of the Talents will allegedly also soon be published in the form of a graphic novel. A TV series based on Butler’s neoslave narrative Kindred (1979) premiered on Hulu in December, and some of her other novels are considered for film and television adaptations. These adaptations were, however, preceded by The Seeing Ear Theater’s radio or audio theater adaptation of Kindred, which aired in February 2001. In this paper, I will draw on Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006; 2nd ed. 2013) in order to begin to discuss the three twenty-first century adaptations of Kindred: the radio play at the very beginning of the century, the graphic novel in the age of BLM and Trump, and the very recently produced TV series. As Hutcheon points out, “An adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context – a time and a place, a society and a culture …” (142). In addition to addressing some contextual aspects, I will examine the adaptations in terms of narrative and aesthetic strategies.
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| 10. |
- Holmgren Troy, Maria, 1962-
(författare)
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Adapting Space/Spaces of Adaptation : Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital (2004)
- 2017
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Lars von Trier’s TV series Riget (The Kingdom, 1994, 1997) engages with space and geography in various ways. The hospital (Rigshospitalet) in Copenhagen provides a labyrinthine and multi-layered setting equivalent to the castle or the haunted house in earlier Gothic narratives. It is a liminal space that both registers clashes and serves as a conduit between the past and the present, between rationality and the supernatural. Riget also highlights tensions cast as national between the Danish hospital staff and a Swedish physician who perceives his Danish colleagues as irrational and unscientific and who longs to be back in Sweden. This paper will draw on Linda Hutcheon’s account in A Theory of Adaptation (2013) of “transculturating” and “transcultural adaptations” in examining how the hospital and geographical tensions are portrayed in Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital (ABC, 2004), an American TV series inspired by and based on Riget. In King’s adaptation the (fictive) hospital is placed in Lewistown, Maine, and the physician at odds with the rest of the hospital staff is from Boston and not from another country. This change, I would argue, introduces a different kind of geographical tension. Apart from discussing this tension and contrasting it to the national one in Riget, I will compare the depiction and function of the hospital in the American TV series to that of the Danish one.
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