| 1. |
- Bodin, Helena, 1964-
(author)
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"Going ashore in Byzantium". On border crossings in Swedophone travelogues from Mount Athos in the 1950s and 60s
- 2015
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In: Borders and the changing boundaries of knowledge. - Stockholm : Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. - 9789197881333 ; , s. 53-73
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The article explores how Byzantium was represented by Mount Athos, the Orthodox Christian monastic republic, in Swedophone travelogues from the 1950s and 60s, and from which bases of knowledge and values this was done. The issue is addressed from a cultural semiotic perspective, based on Yuri Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere in combination with Itamar Even-Zohar’s method of studying cultural and dynamic polysystems.Mount Athos is a cultural and religious centre of great importance to all of “the Byzantine commonwealth”, i.e. a centre within the Byzantine semiosphere. The travellers crossed or faced political, cultural, linguistic and religious borders, yet some of them failed to notice the epistemological border between the semiospheres. Decisive to how Byzantium was represented by Mount Athos was whether the monastic republic was judged and evaluated according to the norms of the Byzantine or the Western cultural system – that is, whether Mount Athos was regarded as central within the Byzantine semiosphere, or as peripheral within the Western semiosphere.
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| 2. |
- Bodin, Helena, 1964-
(author)
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Byzantine Literature for Europe? From Karelia to Istanbul with the Swedish Modernist Poet Gunnar Ekelöf
- 2009
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In: Literature for Europe?. - Amsterdam : Rodopi. - 9789042027169 - 9789042027176 ; , s. 363-385
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- During the 1950s and 1960s the former notion of Byzantine culture as rigid and artificial turns into a challenge and a complex field of interest for several Western European writers. One of them is the well-known Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf (1907–1968), who found Byzantine tradi- tions still alive in Orthodox piety, in Istanbul and Greece, as well as in the Balkans and Karelia. Fascinated by these folk traditions he used ele- ments of Orthodox hymns and icons in his poems, whereby they gained a new function of estrangement with modern Swedish readers and cri- tics. Ekelöf never called himself a Christian – he rather saw himself as an outsider. To him, Byzantium held the desirable position of being located outside of traditional Western aesthetic norms and cultural borders, yet close in time and space. Ekelöf’s work is an intriguing metaphor for this paradoxical role played by the Byzantine tradition in modern European literature, itself a subject in need for further study and discussion.
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| 3. |
- Hansen, Julie, et al.
(author)
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Nordic Literary Translingualism
- 2022
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In: The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism. - London : Routledge. - 9780367279189 - 9780429298745 ; , s. 165-176
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This chapter surveys the diverse landscape of literary translingualism in the Nordic region. A brief overview of contemporary language situations in the Nordic countries is followed by an examination of translingual aspects of the work of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Edith Södergran, Karen Blixen, and Kjartan Fløgstad. The subsequent sections discuss trends in Nordic literary translingualism from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, focusing in particular on postcolonial contexts, minority literatures, and migration. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how works by Tomas Tranströmer, Caroline Bergvall, and Cia Rinne invite translingual readings.
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| 4. |
- Bodin, Helena, 1964-
(author)
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Heterographics as a Literary Device : Auditory, Visual, and Cultural Features
- 2018
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In: Journal of World Literature. - : Brill. - 2405-6472 .- 2405-6480. ; 3:2, s. 196-216
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Heterographics (“other lettering”) refers to the use of two scripts in one text or a translation of a text from one script to another. How might the occasional use of heterographics in literary texts highlight issues of cultural diversity? Drawing on intermedial theory and studies of literary multilingualism, literary translation, and pluriliteracies, this article examines various functions of heterographics in selected contemporary literary texts. Examples of embedded Greek, Chinese, Cyrillic, and Arabic script are analysed in works published in Swedish, French, and English between 2004 and 2015, selected because they thematise cultural diversity and linguistic boundaries. The conclusion is that heterographic devices emphasise the heteromediality of literary texts, thereby heightening readers’ awareness of the visual-spatial features of literary texts, as well as of the materiality of scripts. Heterographics influence readers’ experiences of cultural affinity or alterity, that is, of inclusion or exclusion, depending on their access to practices of pluriliteracies.
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| 5. |
- Bodin, Helena, 1964-
(author)
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Bysans som gränsland i Julia Kristevas roman Murder in Byzantium
- 2009
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In: Bysantinska sällskapet Bulletin. - Uppsala. - 1102-674X. ; 27, s. 5-18
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This article discusses the notion of Byzantium and Byzantium’s potential capacities as a multifaceted borderland, as shaped and perceived in Julia Kristeva’s novel Murder in Byzantium. In spite of its title, this is not a historical, but rather a so-called total novel, which reconciles several different plots – romantic, criminal, political and philosophical. It relies on both fictive and historical texts, especially on The Alexiad, written in the 12th century by the Byzantine princess and the first female historian ever, Anna Comnena. Through a literary analysis, this article shows how Byzantium is shaped in the novel by transgressions of the borders of narration, identity, space and time. Byzantium is thus of great interest to the general public and an academic discussion of borders, origin, history and culture, so important for the discussion of Europe’s role today in – or, as suggested in the novel, perhaps between – Eastern and Western cultures.
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| 6. |
- Bodin, Helena, 1964-, et al.
(author)
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Afterword. World literature in the making
- 2022
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In: Literature and the Making of the World. - London : Bloomsbury Academic. - 9781501374159 - 9781501374173 - 9781501374166 - 9781501374180 ; , s. 307-311
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)
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| 7. |
- Bodin, Helena, 1964-
(author)
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Modernist Writers and the Multilingual Print Culture of Constantinople
- 2022
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In: Parallax. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1353-4645 .- 1460-700X. ; 28:1, s. 28-42
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The productive challenges of the linguistic and cultural unknown provide a framework for this exploration of texts created or published between 1906 and 1915 on Constantinople by Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, and Vasily Kamensky, which engage with the multifarious expressions and stimuli of the imperial capital. The heterogeneity of narrative and cognitive strategies with which they convey their experiences connotes Constantinople as a contested object of desire of several national and supranational forces between East and West that defies the single, monolingual community, be it imagined or real. The multilingual and multiscriptal print culture of Constantinople, as well as the modernist writers’ literary and artistic imagination and their various translation and transcription practices, delineate what Bodin defines as heterolingualism, namely, linguistic – or literary – situations where communication in one language directed to other languages and produced in otherscripts forms the expected precondition.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Bodin, Helena, 1964-
(author)
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Sophie Elkan's Ambiguous Dream of the Orient : On Cultural Identity and the National Literary Canon
- 2015
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In: Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia. - Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing. - 9781443878388 - 1443878383 ; , s. 78-103
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The aim is to consider the formation of a Nordic literary canon from a cultural semiotic perspective as presented by Yuri M. Lotman and others, by means of a discussion of a Swedish and Western identity and selfunderstanding as mirrored and enacted in several works by the Swedish writer Sophie Elkan (1853–1921) set in Sweden, Egypt, Lebanon, and Constantinople. The works examined are the novel Drömmen om Österlandet [The Dream of the Orient], and two short stories, “Herr Schwartz” [“Mr. Schwarz”] and “Ställ ut armeniern!” [“Sling out the Armenian!”], all published in 1901. I propose an understanding of the literary canon as a kind of cultural, collective memory. Elkan’s narratives, set in Oriental milieus, are demonstrated to create their own semiotic spaces, where the semiospheres of traditional Western and Eastern cultures overlap in surprisingly new constellations. Her stories question otherwise not explicitly articulated cultural norms and enquire into presupposed normative Swedish or Western cultural identities. According to the argument of cultural semiotics, it is essential to all national literatures, their canons and the cultural identities they foster that challenging stories like these, stories which stage cultural clashes, cultural misunderstandings and cultural differences, are narrated, discussed and interpreted.
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| 10. |
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Literature and the Making of the World: Cosmopolitan Texts, Vernacular Practices
- 2022
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Editorial collection (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This open access book positions itself at the intersection of world literature studies, literary anthropology and philosophical critiques of 'world' and 'globe' concepts. Doing so, it investigates how literature imagines and shapes worlds for its readers through linguistically specific cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics, both at the level of textual engagement and on a material level of textual production and circulation. Moving from textual analyses in Part One – 'Worlds in Texts' – to combined analyses of texts, media and agents in the literary field in Part Two – 'Texts in Worlds' – the concerns of these nine chapters range from multilingualism, genre and style to material forms such as the little magazine or the scrapbook archive and finally to activities such as travel (as a writing profession) and literary promotion. With this focus on practice – which geographically engages with Constantinople, China, Russia, western Europe, North America, southern Africa and India – contributors demonstrate methodologically how world literature studies can bring the empirically specific detail to bear on global modes of analysis. It is precisely through such a dual optic that the world-making capacity of literature becomes apparent.
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