| 1. |
- Olsson, Ulf, 1953-
(författare)
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August Strindberg : mellan tal och tystnad
- 2022
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Ingår i: Strindbergiana. - Stockholm : Strindbergssällskapet. - 9789151923031 ; , s. 21-34
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 2. |
- Olsson, Ulf, 1953-
(författare)
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Dissonant Silence : Susan Sontag and the Aesthetics of Silence
- 2022
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Ingår i: Silence and its Derivatives. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783031065224 ; , s. 63-86
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- With Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” as starting point, this chapter discusses what silence could mean in modern art. While the chapter’s argument acknowledges Sontag’s emphasis on silence as a relation—silence is always related to sound in different forms—it refutes her view of the artist as a liberal subject administering, applying, and ultimately controlling the presence of silence, as being too instrumental. This chapter uses works by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Rancière, respectively, in order to articulate and emphasize the presence of silence in the work of art as a structural element, that the artist—whether painter, writer, musician, dancer, …—has to listen to and provide a form for. Works by American painter Agnes Martin exemplify how an experience of silence can be expressed in what Martin calls an “artwork which is also wordless and silent.” The activity that for Martin generates this silent work of art is “waiting”: both artist and beholder must wait for silence to make itself heard.
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| 3. |
- Olsson, Ulf, 1953-
(författare)
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Drawing Up the Account : Administrative Discourse in Strindberg's Works
- 2020
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Ingår i: August Strindberg und die Aufklärung. - Würzburg : Verlag Königshausen & Neumann. - 9783826069079 ; , s. 139-153
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Does August Strindberg ever reach that pinnacle of Enlightenment called ”Mündigkeit”? It is of course Immanuel Kant, who states that “Mündigkeit” is the ultimate goal of the liberal individual, who thereby constitutes himself as a subject. But it is a strange word, this “Mündigkeit”: translated into Swedish, it means both the kind of individual, mature responsibility that Kant hinted at, as well as an institutional authority, even a government. Strindberg himself said that he “never wrote governmental poetry nor ministerial literature” (”Jag har aldrig skrivit regeringspoesi eller ministerlitteratur”). Still, Strindberg was always very interested in questions of government, how to govern both a state and oneself. My paper relates Strindberg’s late works to questions of governmentality, focusing on the presence and function of administrative discourses and practices in his works. My suggestion is that Strindberg verifies Michel Foucault’s hypotheses in The Birth of Biopolitics: ”And finally, the individual’s life itself— with his relationships to his private property, for example, with his family, household, insurance, and retirement— must make him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.”
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| 4. |
- Olsson, Ulf, 1953-
(författare)
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"Incisive, Dissonant" Rationality vs. Aesthtic Modernism : Hedenius and Trotzig
- 2020
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Ingår i: Humanities. - : MDPI AG. - 2076-0787. ; 9:3, s. 1-10
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Swedish “Welfare State” of the 1950s was described as a rational, well-organized society by leading Swedish philosopher, Professor Ingemar Hedenius. His biopolitical vision emphasized the scientific basis for social reforms, and he was an active opponent to any kind of religious thinking. Hedenius also worked as a literary critic, and he would use that role to confront literary representations of contemporary society that did not fit in with his promulgation of rationality. Hedenius furiously attacked Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig’s A Landscape (1959). In her book, she challenges any harmonizing vision of society. She does it through representations of the body, and the gaze that does not shy away from the anguished and pained body, the body opening up and giving birth. The body in Trotzig’s work is also the tortured body of Christ. With the Swedish welfare state as a point of reference, this article explores the collision between what can be called a “rational modernism” and aesthetic modernism: Hedenius called Trotzig’s book “evil,” and Trotzig, when she commented upon this almost three decades later, saw Hedenius’s review as an authoritarian assault.
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| 5. |
- Olsson, Ulf, 1953-
(författare)
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The art of self-defensive : Diary, Memory, and the Subject
- 2024
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Studies. - 0036-5637 .- 2163-8195. ; 96:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In his On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin asks what memory can mean at a moment of danger. Suggesting that we all are at such a moment of danger today, I discuss what role and function literary memory can play or fulfill in an age marked by right-wing extremism, climate change, authoritarian governments, as that age in its complexity is represented in three contemporary, but different, Swedish literary diaries by Lars Nor & eacute;n, Ulf Lundell, and & Aring;sa Linderborg . In these works, each author claims to have become homeless, and that the world surrounding the writing subject has become threatening, but also generating acts of remembrance of the past. The three writers construe differing subject positions to make memory possible. Memory can further be related to class and gender, and it can be divided into personal or subjective as well as cultural or social memories. Aiming to understand what their respective memory work entails, I discuss the diary as a memory machine, and what the social dangers that these writers risk confronting could mean, and whether literature in the form of diaries can turn into a defense against cumulative moments of danger. And what role does the act of forgetting play? The memory work in the three diaries seemingly focuses the individual in an act of self -representation, and one must further ask if these representations are also intended as a defense of self and subject.
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