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- Freij, Maria
(författare)
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Into the Texan sunset : Metanostalgia, retro-, and introspection in Lars Gustafsson’s “Where the alphabet has two hundred letters”
- 2018
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Ingår i: Humanities. - : MDPI AG. - 2076-0787. ; 7:103
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- If restorative nostalgia concentrates on national past and future and reflective nostalgia onindividual memory (Boym 2001), Lars Gustafsson’s “Where the Alphabet Has Two Hundred Letters” does neither. This article argues that Gustafsson’s treatment of the past landscape is metanostalgic, in the sense that nostalgia is a theme and a means, rather than a sentiment, and that the way his tropic reinvention deals with nostalgia differs from other uses. Though the poem partakes in the pastoral tradition, it is less concerned with this mode and more concerned with the notion of ‘effect’, of which Gustafsson has written extensively. Gustafsson has also elaborated on the aspects of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, notions that are used to define and extend the poetic landscape and the speaker’s position in, and relation to, it. His poetic landscape encompasses the extremes of continents near and far, but also landscapes temporally removed, which may hold a different status in terms of their impact on ‘effect’, a status that is then not hinging on the obvious hierarchies of traditional nostalgia.
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| 2. |
- Jansson, Mats, 1956
(författare)
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In the Traces of Modernism: William Faulkner in Swedish Criticism 1932–1950
- 2018
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Ingår i: Humanities. - : MDPI AG. - 2076-0787. ; 2018:7, s. 1-22
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article focusses the reception of William Faulkner in Sweden from the first introduction in 1932 until the Nobel Prize announcement in 1950. Through reviews, introductory articles, book chapters, forewords, and translations, the critical evaluation of Faulkner’s particular brand of modernism is traced and analysed. The analysis takes theoretical support from Hans Robert Jauss’ notion of ‘horizon of expectations’, Gérard Genette’s concept of ‘paratext’, and E.D. Hirsh’s distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’. To pinpoint the biographical and psychologizing tendency in Swedish criticism, Roland Barthes’s notion of ‘biographeme’ is introduced. The analysis furthermore shows that the critical discussion of Faulkner’s modernism could be ordered along an axis where the basic parameters are form and content, aesthetics and ideology, narrator and author, and writer and reader. The problematics adhering to these fundamental aspects are more or less relevant for the modernist novel in general. Thus, it could be argued that the reception of Faulkner in Sweden and Swedish Faulkner criticism epitomize and highlight the fundamental features pertaining to the notion of ‘modernism’, both with regard to its formal and content-based characteristics.
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| 3. |
- Kella, Elizabeth, 1958-
(författare)
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Matrophobia and Uncanny Kinship : Eva Hoffman’s The Secret
- 2018
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Ingår i: Humanities. - : MDPI. - 2076-0787. ; 7:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Eva Hoffman, known primarily for her autobiography of exile, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), is also the author of a work of Gothic science fiction, set in the future. The Secret: A Fable for our Time (2001) is narrated by a human clone, whose discovery that she is the “monstrous” cloned offspring of a single mother emerges with growing discomfort at the uncanny similarities and tight bonds between her and her mother. This article places Hoffman’s use of the uncanny in relation to her understanding of Holocaust history and the condition of the postmemory generation. Relying on Freud’s definition of the uncanny as being “both very alien and deeply familiar,” she insists that “the second generation has grown up with the uncanny.” In The Secret, growing up with the uncanny leads to matrophobia, a strong dread of becoming one’s mother. This article draws on theoretical work by Adrienne Rich and Deborah D. Rogers to argue that the novel brings to “the matrophobic Gothic” specific insights into the uncanniness of second-generation experiences of kinship, particularly kinship between survivor mothers and their daughters.
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| 4. |
- Kingsepp, Eva, 1961-
(författare)
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The Second World War, Imperial, and Colonial Nostalgia : The North Africa Campaign and Battlefields of Memory
- 2018
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Ingår i: Humanities. - : MDPI. - 2076-0787. ; 7:4, s. 1-16
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The article addresses the function of (post)colonial nostalgia in a context of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) in contemporary Europe. How can different cultural memories of the Second Word War be put into respectful dialogue with each other? The text is based on a contrapuntal reading (Said 1994) of British and Egyptian popular narratives, mainly British documentary films about the North Africa Campaign, but also feature films and novels, and data from qualitative interviews collected during ethnographic fieldwork in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt, during visits 2013–2015. The study highlights the considerable differences between the British and Egyptian narratives, but also the significant similarities regarding the use and function of nostalgia. In addition, the Egyptian narrative expresses a profound cosmopolitan nostalgia and a longing for what is regarded as Egypt’s lost, modern Golden Age, identified as the decades before the nation’s fundamental change from western-oriented monarchy to Nasser’s Arab nationalist military state. The common elements between the two national narratives indicate a possibly fruitful way to open up for a shared popular memory culture about the war years, including postcolonial aspects.
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| 5. |
- Makai, Péter Kristóf, 1988-
(författare)
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Video Games as Objects and Vehicles of Nostalgia
- 2018
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Ingår i: Humanities. - Basel : MDPI. - 2076-0787. ; 7:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Barely 50 years old, video games are among the newest media today, and still a source of fascination and a site of anxiety for cultural critics and parents. Since the 1970s, a generation of video gamers have grown up and as they began to have children of their own, video games have become objects evoking fond memories of the past. Nostalgia for simpler times is evident in the aesthetic choices game designers make: pixelated graphics, 8-bit music, and frustratingly hard levels are all reminiscent of arcade-style and third-generation console games that have been etched into the memory of Generation X. At the same time, major AAA titles have become so photorealistic and full of cinematic ambition that video games can also serve as vehicles for nostalgia by “faithfully” recreating the past. From historical recreations of major cities in the Assassin’s Creed series and L. A. Noire, to the resurrection of old art styles in 80 Days, Firewatch or Cuphead all speak of the extent to which computer gaming is suffused with a longing for pasts that never were but might have been. This paper investigates the design of games to examine how nostalgia is used to manipulate affect and player experience, and how it contributes to the themes that these computer games explore. Far from ruining video games, nostalgia nonetheless exploits the associations the players have with certain historical eras, including earlier eras of video gaming. Even so, the juxtaposition of period media and dystopic rampages or difficult levels critically comment upon the futility of nostalgia.
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