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- Agrell, Beata, 1944
(författare)
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”Kroppsminne och kollektiv erfarenhet: Objektiveringens betydelse för produktionen av arbetarlitteraritet.” : “Body memory and collective experience: the significance of objectification for the production of literariness in working class literature”
- 2023
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Ingår i: Scandinavistica Vilnensis. - 2029-2112 .- 2669-0497. ; 17:1, s. 73-95
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Literature is the memory of a culture: whether included in the canon or not, it testifies to conceptions, mentalities, and conditions in its time. Working-class literature is a young literary type, that for long was excluded from the canon and recognized literary tradition, and therefore has a special relationship to memory, experience, and culture. The first Swedish working-class writers were self-taught, without access to the bourgeois cultural heritage. They were workers, writing about workers, for workers and addressing the class collective. But they were also individuals, who started from their own memories and experiences. How did they go about making their own thing a matter for the whole class? How did they integrate the personal into a collective memory culture? That is the main issue in my article. The task is to shed light on the relationship between individual experience and collective memory in the first generation of Swedish working-class prose around 1910. I will dive into this subject matter by employing the notion of literary objectification, understood as creating vivid images, scenes, and situations from personal memories and experiences serving as an objective correlate (T.S. Eliot). The function of this correlate is to evoke recognition at a distance in the implied reader: an alienated recognition (Viktor Shklovsky), or a kind of sustained Verfremdung (Bertolt Brecht), which also includes contemplation and reflection. A working objective correlate, as I understand it here, must be based on some form of collective memory. I want to develop this idea with the support of memory studies, specifically, works by cultural researcher Jan Assmann and phenomenologist Thomas Fuchs. The reasoning will then be tested on some text examples from the working-class authors Dan Andersson (1888–1920), Maria Sandel (1870–1927), and Karl Östman (1876–1953). In particular, I will dwell on depictions of physical labour, the body memories that are objectified, and the extent to which such objectification produces a special proletarian literariness.
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| 3. |
- Nilsson, Magnus, 1975-
(författare)
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Stig Sjödin och minnets politik
- 2023
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Ingår i: Scandinavistica Vilnensis. - Vilnius : Vilnius University Press. - 2029-2112. ; 17:1, s. 97-118
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The aim of this article is to analyse the attitudes to history and memory expressed in the working-class poetry of Stig Sjödin (1917–1993) – both in Sotfratgment (Fragments of Soot) from 1949, which marked his breakthrough as a poet, and in the poetry he wrote for the labour movement (mainly poems published in tradeunion membership magazines or read at meetings and congresses) – and to discuss how he and his poetry are today viewed as reminders of political ideals and experiences threatened by oblivion. There are certain differences between how memory and remembering is treated in Sotfragment and in Sjödin’s labour-movement poetry respectively. In Sotfragment, focus is more often on individual memories and existential problems, whereas in the labour-movement poetry, Sjödin is sometimes more explicitly political and writes about collective memories from a proletarian perspective. These differences are conditioned by differences between the spheres to which the poems belong: that of literature and that of the labour movement. In connection with the rise of left-wing radicalism in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s, Sjödin argued that older working-class literature contained important political experiences and perspectives. This is also how his works are sometimes viewed today, both by working-class writers and by political commentators. Thereby, it is emphasized that literature is not a passive medium for the preservation of memories, but that it can also transform them and make them politically relevant.
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