| 1. |
- Andersson, Hans, 1981-
(författare)
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Något betydelsefullt : Leonid Dobyčins möten bortom orden i den sovjetiska samtiden
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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-
(författare)
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The code of Concord : Emerson's search for universal laws
- 1994. - 1
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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
(författare)
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Den östnordiske ballade - oral teori og tekstanalyse. : Studier i Danmarks gamle Folkeviser
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Hartman, Steven, 1965-
(författare)
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Faces of Thoreau in American Literature
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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-
(författare)
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Travelling objects : modernity and materiality in British Colonial travel literature about Africa
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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. |
- Christensen, Henrik, 1984-
(författare)
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We Call upon the Author : Contemporary Biofiction and Fyodor Dostoevsky
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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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| 8. |
- Ekedahl, Nils
(författare)
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Det svenska Israel : Myt och retorik i Haquin Spegels predikokonst
- 1999
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation deals with the art of preaching of Haquin Spegel (1645-1714) from a political and rhetorical perspective. Spegel was one of the leading churchmen during the period of Carolingian autocratic rule. He was close to Karl XI and had good contacts with the Court and the political elite. The dissertation contains analyses of a number of Spegel's sermons. The theoretical points of departure include in part the theory of `confessionalization' as a basic feature of political culture in Early Modern times, and in part the emphasis of classical rhetoric on the persuasive functions of language. The concept of confessionalization is used to place the sermons in a political context; the terminology of classical rhetoric is used to describe their linguistic formulation.The first two chapters deal with speeches and sermons held in connection with the official manifestations of the Carolingian regime, among them, a celebration in memory of the adoption of the Confessio Augustana as the national Confession and the coronation of Karl XII in 1697. A prime feature in these sermons is the figurative interpretation of history and the myth of Sweden as a latterday counterpart to Israel in the Old Testament, as well as the theocratic teachings on the divine authority of royal power. The purpose of the Confession was, however, not only to convey certain ideas, but also to stimulate the emotional engagement of the listeners and persuade them to live in accordance with confessional morality How Spegel attempted to achieve this is examined in the following two chapters. One of them is devoted to his sermons on the history of the Passion, the moralizing presentation of which is analysed against the background of Lutheran meditation practice. The other chapter is devoted to his funeral sermons for public officials in the service of the state and their wives. A regular feature of the latter are the reminders about a subject's duty to obey the authorities and to work for the country and 'the general good'. In a concluding chapter the results of the textual analysis are placed within the wider perspective of the political culture of Carolingian autocracy and it is shown how Spegel's sermons can be understood as a factor in the spreading of a confessionally stamped national myth which bound the people to God and promoted the maintenance of social discipline among subjects.
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| 9. |
- Kärrholm, Sara
(författare)
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Konsten att lägga pussel. Deckaren och besvärjandet av ondskan i folkhemmet
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present thesis, Konsten att lägga pussel. Deckaren och besvärjandet av ondskan i folkhemmet, constitutes a literary and cultural-historical investigation of the Swedish 'whodunit' from 1945 to 1965, a period when the genre flourished in Sweden. The central questions that the thesis attempts to answer are: How does the Swedish whodunit emerge and develop in a dialogue with its time during the period, usually referred to as the Cold War, and how was a new narrative of good and evil formulated within the framework of this genre? The first chapter contains two main components: a presentation of the whodunit genre and its emergence in 1950s Sweden, and a discussion of the whodunit as a literary formula. Chapter 2 deals with Stieg Trenter's novel Ristat i sten from 1952 and primarily discussesthe attitude to women represented in the novel, as well as the function of male and female. Chapter 3 examines the theme of normal versus deviant sexuality in Maria Lang'sfirst novel, Mördaren ljuger inte ensam from 1949. Chapter 4 deals with H.-K. Rönblom'sdetective novel Senatorn kommer tillbaka from 1959. In this novel Rönblom raised the issues of the family, the small town in Sweden, relations between Sweden and the United States, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Finally, chapter 5 discusses the results of the investigation, grouping them according to major themes: threatened and threatening youth; the woman's role; town and country; and the role of the detective as the protector of threatened progress. The whodunit novels give us ongoing discussions and renegotiations of those social values, roles, and modes of behaviour which other media appear to advocate at the relevant point in time. By stressing good moral qualities like cooperation and family values, issues that were directly connected to the central Swedish metaphor of the time, folkhemmet, the whodunit keeps evil at bay.
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| 10. |
- Nilson, Maria
(författare)
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Att förhålla sig till moderniteten : en studie i Gertrud Liljas författarskap
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to present and discuss the author Gertrud Lilja with a special focus on her relationship to modernity from a feminist perspective. In the 1920s Lilja was regarded as an interesting and promising author. Ten years later she was seen as a conservative and popular author who wrote mainly for women. As this is the first published thesis that discusses Gertrud Lilja it focuses both on her life, her financial situation and her relationship with her publishers in order to be able to discuss Lilja’s place on the Swedish literary field and on her texts, as I give alternative readings of her novels. Discussing Lilja’s place on the Swedish literary field Pierre Bourdieus theory of cultural capital and habitus are important tools. Lilja made her debut in the 1920s and had then, despite her lack of formal education, despite her rural background and despite her gender, a rather strong cultural capital and was both well received by contemporary critics and was well looked after by her publishers. In the years that followed Lilja lost a great deal of her capital. Her publishers wanted her to write less complicated novels for women, she needed money and wrote a number of short stories for magazines, and the field in itself changed as modernism began grow stronger. Lilja’s text were seen more and more as old fashioned and conservative and she was seen as a popular writer and an uninteresting one. I argue that Gertrud Lilja should be seen as a middlebrow author, a realistic author that has popular elements in her texts. Middlebrow has always been problematic and shunned by many critics and read as simply popular literature. Being a middlebrow author makes is difficult to be taken seriously and Lilja’s critique of her contemporary society and her rather radical critique of a patriarchal religion has not been addressed. Discussing modernity from a feminist perspective and questioning the idea of what it is to be modern, who can be modern and what it means to be conservative, I argue that simply saying that Lilja was a conservative author is not enough. In some ways she gives in her texts a rather harsh criticism of the new and modern society that grow stronger during the 1930-40s, but she also in some ways embraces modernity in her critique of the “good old days” and of the patriarchal religion. Reading Lilja’s texts in dialogue with , for example, the ongoing discussion of women’s new role in society, of sexuality, of religion, images of God and the need for a new kind of church I argue that Lilja shows a great deal of ambivalence towards modernity.
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