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- Andersson, Hans, 1981-
(author)
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Något betydelsefullt : Leonid Dobyčins möten bortom orden i den sovjetiska samtiden
- 2019
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis studies the 1931 short story collection Portret [The Portrait] by the Russian author Leonid Ivanovich Dobychin (1894–1936?). My main argument is that the principal theme in Dobychin’s writings arises out of the complexities of human encounters. My approach is based on affirmative interpretations that I call “encountering” readings. They draw on critical practices developed by Boris Gasparov, who argues in his 2013 study of Pasternak Boris Pasternak: Po tu storonu poėtiki (Filosofiia. Muzyka. Byt) that the key to Pasternak’s work lies not in the dominant feature of their linguistic texture, but in the momentary states of everyday life that the author captures, and Henri Meschonnic’s Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage (1982). Meschonnic focuses on rhythm as an intrinsic aspect of the text that requires the reader to participate actively in appreciating the text as a work of art by following the interplay between rhythm, the active subject and what is expressed. Both scholars reflect a turn away from the linguistically informed theoretical approaches that dominated the academic study of literature in the twentieth century. Similarly, I approach Dobychin’s characters on the level of their personal conflicts and everyday lives by simulating an interpersonal encounter in an anti-theoretical search for meaning that is congenial to both the central theme of the stories and the way in which they reveal human encounters “beyond words,” as it were, both within the works and with the reader, through suggestive associations and not yet categorized, “precategorial” experiences in everyday life. The “unoutspokenness” (nedogovorënnost’)—i.e. reticence, a deliberate avoidance of explicitness that Dobychin’s contemporary critics ascribed to his writings and often disparaged as “incomprehensibility”—serves as a starting point for a critical discussion of both earlier research on Dobychin and theoretical approaches to literature more generally. In searching for a dominant formal feature, a ‘key’ or ‘code’, in Dobychin’s writings, earlier scholars have tended to describe it in terms of an anti-aesthetic. The alleged lack of plot, inner coherence and meaning is explained as deliberate, intended to performatively mirror the absurdness and inadequacies, the disorientation and loss of meaning in Soviet reality itself. In this thesis, I argue instead that there is no such lack or incoherence in Dobychin’s works. The “nedogovorënnost’” of his short stories is instead understood as an exact and purposeful way of conveying meaning through what is experienced and shared beyond words in a time that was overburdened with idealistic ideological discourses. At the heart of Dobychin’s stories are moments of fragile human interaction that underlie trivial dialogues and actions in banal everyday existence. The stories let the reader experience the sudden and unexpected human connections that the characters encounter in their everyday impressions. The contrasts and plurality of human perspectives thus perceived evoke a potential interaction beyond societal roles. These brief encounters are presented as something precarious in a Soviet society striving towards a single true ideology. Such a reading suggests that Dobychin is not so much a deliberately enigmatic author as a writer who aspires to express in words that which is profoundly wordless: the encounters between people outside of the ideological categories and discourses of their language.
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| 2. |
- Hallengren, Anders, 1950-
(author)
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The code of Concord : Emerson's search for universal laws
- 1994. - 1
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The purpose of this work is to detect a pattern: the concordance of Ethics and Aesthetics, Poetics and Politics in the most influential American thinker of the nineteenth century. It is an attempt to trace a basic concept of the Emersonian transcendentalist doctrine, its development, its philosophical meaning and practical implications. Emerson’s thought is analyzed genetically in search of the generating paradigm, or the set of axioms from which his aesthetic ideas as well as his political reasoning are derived. Such a basic structure, or point of convergence, is sought in the emergence of Emerson’s idea of universal laws that repeat themselves on all levels of reality.A general introduction is given in Part One, where the crisis in Emerson’s life is seen as representing and foreshadowing the deeper existential crisis of modern man.In Part 2 we follow the increasingly skeptical theologian’s turn to science, where he tries to secure a safe secular foundation for ethical good and right and to solve the problem of evil.Part 3 shows how Emerson’s conception of the laws of nature and ethics is applied in his political philosophy.In Part 4, Emerson’s ideas of the arts are seen as corresponding to his views of nature, morality, and individuality.Finally, in Part 5, the ancient and classical nature of Concord philosophy is brought into focus.The book concludes with a short summary.
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| 3. |
- Kvärndrup, Sigurd
(author)
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Den östnordiske ballade - oral teori og tekstanalyse. : Studier i Danmarks gamle Folkeviser
- 2006
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Disputatsen introducerer den internationale balladeforskning siden 1900, idet balladen beskrives som en internationalt udbredt kunstform med mange ganrer. Den indförer en skelnen mellem to af disse, östnordiske viser og vestnordiske kvad; sidstnävnte har et forläg i historiske begivenheder, myter eller litteräre fortällinger, mens viser generelt er fiktion med skabelonagtige handlinger. Begge genrer er opbygget i dramatiske scener, ofte med ganske originale replikker, introduceret af en skenbart objektiv fortäller og krydret med et folkeligt, lyrisk billedsprog, tildels i skikkelse af formler. Hver af disputatsens fire dele afrundes med en längere tekstanalyse. Fjerde del diskuterer visens typiske ästetik, og det vises at en feminin billedverden har haft stor indflydelse på visernes introduktionsfelter; i centralfelterne kan handlingen ofte slå om fra realis til irrealis, den bliver panisk og overskridende, mens finalfeltet söger at opnå forlig og kontraktindstiftelse, eller forlis og tragedie.
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| 5. |
- Hartman, Steven, 1965-
(author)
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Faces of Thoreau in American Literature
- 2003
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Doctoral dissertation supervised by Professor Ronald A. Bosco (co-supervised by Professor Judith Johnson and Professor Judith Fetterley), Department of English, University at Albany, State University of New York. This study examines the ways in which a number of American writers respond pointedly to the life and writings of Henry David Thoreau in their own works, with a special emphasis on recent writers. Throughout the study I consider Thoreau not only as a valorized author in the American literary tradition but as a powerful cultural icon of shifting significations. The study focuses in particular on how received versions of the author and his texts feed back into the American literary tradition vis-a-vis the mediating influence of other writers. Primary focus texts include works by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Edward Abbey and Hayden Carruth. The focus texts offer constructions of Thoreau that correspond to a few of the most prominent ways in which our culture has memorialized the author of Walden in a variety of reductive guises. These works have been chosen for the range of ways in which Thoreau appears in them (as dramatic or fictionalized character, as intertextual 'collaborator' or as biographical/literary discourse subject), as well as for the various versions of Thoreau's life and writings that they promote. These distinct versions of Thoreau can be seen as significant literary expressions of the impetus in American culture to memorialize or vilify Thoreau under a number of competing rubrics. The many responses to Thoreau's life, works and received legacy in our culture correlate to an interesting variety of ways in which our recent literature responds to Thoreau by embracing, repudiating, and/or problematizing what he is believed to represent. I situate recent literary representations of Thoreau within a proper historical context by tracing their lineage back to a gallery of prototypical constructions of the author promoted by writers in the decades following his death. As Thoreau was the first writer to offer a textual representation of himself in the American literary tradition, Walden, the Journal and "Resistance to Civil Government" are also a central focus in the study. Other writers discussed include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, James Russell Lowell, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Allen Ginsberg. Mahatma Gandhi's role in aggrandizing Thoreau and animating some of his most prominent modern 'faces' is also an important focus.
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| 6. |
- Hållen, Nicklas, 1983-
(author)
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Travelling objects : modernity and materiality in British Colonial travel literature about Africa
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study examines the functions of objects in a selection of British colonial travel accounts about Africa. The works discussed were published between 1863 and 1908 and include travelogues by John Hanning Speke, Verney Lovett Cameron, Henry Morton Stanley, Mary Henrietta Kingsley, Ewart Scott Grogan, Mary Hall and Constance Larymore. The author argues that objects are deeply involved in the construction of pre-modern and modern spheres that the travelling subject moves between. The objects in the travel accounts are studied in relation to a contextual background of Victorian commodity and object culture, epitomised by the 1851 Great Exhibition and the birth of the modern anthropological museum. The four analysis chapters investigate the roles of objects in ethnographical and geographical writing, in ideological discussions about the transformative powers of colonial trade, and in narratives about the arrival of the book in the colonial periphery. As the analysis shows, however, objects tend not to behave as they are expected to do. Instead of marking temporal differences, descriptions of objects are typically unstable and riddled with contradictions and foreground the ambivalence that characterises colonial literature.
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| 7. |
- Leopold, Lennart, 1949-
(author)
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Skönhetsdyrkare och socialdemokrat : studier i Bengt Lidforss litteraturkritiska gärning
- 2001
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Bengt Lidforss (1868–1913) was professor of botany between 1910 and 1913. But after the turn of the century he also emerged as a charismatic leader within the Swedish working-class movement. He became one of its foremost publicists. In the social democratic newspaper Arbetet in Malmö he wrote about natural sciences but also about political, philosophical and literary issues. As a literary critic Lidforss was the keenest protector of the Scanian literary school, and his struggle for Ola Hansson and Vilhelm Ekelund has made its mark in Swedish literary history, as have his contributions in favour of Gustaf Fröding and August Strindberg, culminating in the polemic articles during the Strindberg Feud (1910–11). Skönhetsdyrkare och socialdemokrat. Studier i Bengt Lidforss litteraturkritiska gärning (Worshipper of Beauty And Social Democrat. Studies in Bengt Lidforss’ Achievement As A Literary Critic) emphasises the paradoxic combination of Lidforss’ fundamentally socialist views and a strong belief in art. To him art was not isolated from society but quite the contrary; a significant factor in the changing of society. The new socialistic human being should be ennobled by arts instead of emasculated by religion. With the help of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “field”, it is shown how Lidforss, by attacking leading middle-class newspapers and publicists, created for himself and Arbetet a constantly stronger position within the field of journalism. Within the field of literary criticism he attacked the middle-class critics, and thus participated in associating Strindberg and Fröding as well as the young Scanian writers with the working-class movement. Lidforss’ literary taste was seen as an alternative to middle-class taste and the worshipping of beauty thereby became fashionable among socialists. The fact that one finds sympathies not only for symbolism but also for decadent descriptions with Lidforss the socialist, has to do with the fact that the descriptions of the discomfort of the heroes revealed the disadvantages of the capitalist society. Nevertheless Lidforss’ issued warnings against programmatic pessimism, since he was of the opinion that literature should strengthen people in their struggle. When it came to the plight of the human being under capitalism he was a pessimist, but he believed the stronger in a future socialist society. The terms for the artists would be more tolerable in such a society, he prophesied. He admitted that revolutionary poetry could be useful but was of the opinion that the quality of art would lessen if it consciously served politics. The revolutionary poetry he praised in his reviews was poetry he found genuine and coming from the heart. He did not favour pronounced tendencies, but he liked to use poetry in a political context.
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| 8. |
- Mattisson, Jane, 1953-
(author)
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Knowledge and survival in the novels of Thomas Hardy
- 2000
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis identifies two different kinds of knowledge in Thomas Hardy's novels: the everyday, passed on from generation to generation, which is non-academic and closely bound to the local environment and its traditions; and the specialised, recorded in the printed word, which is the product of formal education and independent of the local community and its traditions. These two kinds of epistemological competence determine one's ability to adapt and survive in a changing society. It is argued that everyday knowledge does not promote analytical thinking and the ability to predict; specialised knowledge, on the other hand, is closely related to scientific analytical thinking and is thus more in tune with the scientific world view which developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The two forms of knowledge are discussed in relation to three groups of characters: the rustics, the lower/middle class and the upper-middle/upper class. Selected concepts taken from the work of Pierre Bourdieu have been used to identify the source, nature and scope of the various characters' knowledge within the three groups. With the aid of Basil Bernstein's concepts of the ‘restricted' and ‘elaborated' codes, dialogues are seen to constitute a useful indication of the type of knowledge which an individual character possesses. Throughout the study reference is made to historical factors, local as well as national, in the belief that what the reader brings to the text constitutes a third, and vital, form of knowledge. While today's reader has the benefit of hindsight, s/he lacks intimate knowledge of nineteenth-century social/working conditions. All fourteen published novels have been analysed to show that, while Hardy's sympathies lay with the rustics, he was keenly aware that the lower/middle class had the greatest potential for survival in the transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society. It is the purpose of this study to demonstrate that historical research and sociological/sociolinguistic theory provide valuable insights into Hardy's prose by illuminating salient features of his texts and in outlining a pattern of thought in his writing. The introduction presents the assumptions on which the study is based and defines the tools which have been used. Chapter One discusses national developments in education, concentrating on those which are most pertinent to Hardy's novels. The chapter which follows looks at educational developments in Dorset and concludes with a review of Hardy's own education. Chapter Three considers Hardy's early novels, from Desperate Remedies to A Laodicean. The latter represents a turning-point in Hardy's literary career, as it is the first work in which he openly focuses on the juxtaposition of the traditional and the modern. Chapter Four discusses Hardy's later novels, from Two on a Tower to Jude the Obscure. The later novels are more obviously concerned with science and its significance for future developments. The study closes with a short summary and some suggestions for future research.
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| 10. |
- Christensen, Henrik, 1984-
(author)
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We Call upon the Author : Contemporary Biofiction and Fyodor Dostoevsky
- 2021
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis studies fictional representations of Fyodor Dostoevsky in contemporary biofiction. The aim of the study is to present an intermedial theoretical framework for biofiction, a genre defined as fictional biographical and often metafictional narratives in which a biographical subject serves as the focal point for the story or plays a role integral to the narrative. Drawing on contributions from prior studies within different areas—biopics, the biographical novel, intermediality, transmedial narratology—the thesis identifies the most salient tenets of an increasingly important and ubiquitous genre—its fictional, intermedial, and metafictional properties—to suggest a medium-spanning definition. From this intermedial definition of the genre, it is suggested that biofiction studies should move beyond medium-specific analysis. By situating the genre firmly within the realm of fiction, the thesis underlines the fact that it is exactly the fictional element that allows the genre to open up important ways to engage with a certain biographical subject. Overall, the biofiction definition presented in the thesis is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s différance.Arguing that contemporary biofiction arose from the larger aporetic shift in theory and fiction in the 1960s, which was directed toward various presuppositions undergirding epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological projects, it is contended that biofiction fictionalizes subjects to engage with and reassess the assumptions that suffuse our understanding of the subject. From their metafictional perspective, biofictions also employ subjects for various purposes to interrogate contemporary issues. Biofictions are thus turned toward both a historical moment and its own contemporary context. Buttressed by the intermedial perspective, it is argued that biofictions often employ sustained intermedial strategies—for instance, intermedial references and formal imitation—to engage not only with artistic subjects such as Dostoevsky and their work but also with the premises of creating art.The thesis centers on five Dostoevsky biofictions within film and literature: Aleksandr Zarkhi’s biopic Twenty-Six Days from the Life of Dostoevsky (1980), Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden (1982), J. M. Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), Lara Vapnyar’s novel Memoirs of a Muse (2006), and Vladimir Khotinenko’s television series Dostoevsky (2010). As contemporary biofictions, these fictional representations of Dostoevsky were all produced or written in the wake of the aforementioned aporetic shift and therefore comprise examples of the reflexive and metacritical form of biofiction that is discussed in the thesis. The inclusion of Dostoevsky biofictions is, in part, connected with the various critical perceptions of the writer; it is maintained that biofictions such as those analyzed in the thesis proffer new readings of issues that have been overlooked or have not received due attention, such as how Dostoevsky engaged with and augmented the rivalry polemics of his day; the ways in which his conceptualization of Russian identity rested as much on inclusion as exclusion; how Dostoevsky has been employed to propagate certain models of the muse, the genius, and canonicity; and how, in today’s Russia, the writer is employed to embody and express the hyperreal politics of Vladimir Putin’s administration.
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