| 1. |
- Ulfgard, Maria
(författare)
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För att bli kvinna - och av lust : en studie i tonårsflickors läsning
- 2002
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- As part of the development of the teaching of literature in school, it is also important to reflect upon what pupils read outside school. This thesis deals with the spare time reading of twenty 15-16-year-old girls which has been examined during a two-year period. Empirical material related to young girls’ reading is examined in a variety of scholarly methods. Young girls’ reading is studied in the light of reception theory; novels are analysed by means of narratology; young girls’ lives are charted from perspectives drawn from cultural sociology and social psychology; finally, all aspects of the empirical material are tested by means of theories derived from gender studies. For the purposes of the thesis the initial question has been broken down into three segments: To what extent the girls actually engage in reading in their spare time, what they read, and what importance they attach to their reading. Another aim, which focusses attention on the connection between the girls’ lives and their reading, has been to find out to what extent the girls’ choice of literature is determined by geographical, social, cultural, and religious factors and by the teaching of literature at school. The third aim has been to find out how gender is constructed in the books that the girls choose to read, how they construct gender while reading these books, and how they construct gender in their own lives. The results of the study suggest that pleasure is a strong factor governing the girls’ reading and that there is a strong connection between the girls’ construction of their identity, including the formation of gender, and their choice of literature and the development of their reading. The study shows that the fiction chosen by the girls themselves mirrors their lives and that the social, cultural and religious factors have an influence on their reading. The relevance of the results of the thesis to the teaching of literature in Swedish schools is discussed. A dialogue is initiated with Läroplanens värdegrund, Lpo 94 and with Kursplan 2000, the Swedish syllabus currently used.
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| 2. |
- Ullström, Sten-Olof
(författare)
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Likt och olikt. Strindbergsbildens förvandlingar i gymnasiet
- 2002
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This doctorial thesis deals with the changes in the image of August Strindberg in Swedish Senior High School Education. Strindberg represents the breakthrough of modern literature in Sweden, where the bounds between public and intimate spheres are challenged. The study investigates how and why the image of a writer is qualified or disqualified for inclusion in a national literary discourse of teaching, and why this image varies. Strindberg’s role illustrates how literary meaning is constructed in higher mother tongue education. Learning and literary understanding are viewed as dialogical, communicative processes. The literary classroom is, however, an arena for a process of sociocultural reproduction and socialization, where linguistic actions also serve non-communicative purposes and various relations of power influence the teaching process. The present study begins around the 1880s. The bulk of the thesis deals with the period beginning around the early 1900s up to the mid-sixties, but it also includes outlooks on teaching today. The research is based on a critical analysis of texts produced for or within literary education. Passages or chapters on Strindberg in frequently used textbooks of literary history are discussed, as well as works of Strindberg represented in school and text selections in various anthologies. Additionally, close to 300 student essays on Strindberg were retrieved from seven or more educational institutions, dated in 1912, 1923, 1943, 1950, and 1960. The approach to Strindberg in school became ambiguous and divided. In the beginning, textbooks and educational institutions tended to ignore his literary authorship. Later on, literary works with themes from national history were given priority, but this canon was mainly studied with a number of important reservations. A qualitative inconsistency in Strindberg’s writings was brought forth as a basis for selection. Many times, this artistic inconsistency was attributed to Strindberg’s psyche. Taken together, the student essays present a picture of how different conceptions of Strindberg have been reproduced and constructed at the senior high school level during half a century. Despite the many stereotypes, the student essays stand out as more or less heterogeneous and reflect, to varying degrees, multiple voices. Even though the teaching of literature often has strongly influenced the reading pre-ferences of the predominant culture, to some students, it has also sometimes had a meaning-making function.
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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
- Mattisson, Jane, 1953-
(författare)
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Knowledge and survival in the novels of Thomas Hardy
- 2000
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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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| 5. |
- Olsson, Kenneth, 1960-
(författare)
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Le discours beur comme positionnement littéraire : Romans et textes autobiographiques franςais (2005-2006) d'auteurs issus de l'immigration maghrébine
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The subject of this thesis is the contemporary literature written by the sons and daughters of North African immigrant families in France. Its main area of investigation is the place of this literature in the French literary field, in the Bourdieusian sense of the term, and the discursive features which motivate the ethnic based label of “Beur literature”. The study has a double approach in investigating both the argument for the socio-ethnic categorisation, and the reception of this literature in the French press. The literary corpus consists of twenty works from 2005 and 2006 by eighteen Beur writers. Thirteen of these works are subject to literary analysis. These are novels by Akli Tadjer, Zahia Rahmani, Faïza Guène, Mabrouck Rachedi, El Driss, Mohamed Razane, Houda Rouane, Nora Hamdi, Nor Eddine Boudjedia and Touhami Moualek, and three autobiographical narratives written by Razika Zitouni, Abel El Quandili and Aziz Senni. The press corpus from the corresponding period covers 14 titles of French national and regional daily papers, 8 titles of weekly general press and 6 titles of periodicals of literary and social debate. According to my hypothesis, the Beur fiction and the autobiographical narratives of my corpus are based on a common discourse that is expressed through certain literary means. A frequent strategy found in the novels is the subversion of French classics. Another feature is the constant referral to the French republican values. The novels share the latter of these two strategies with the autobiographical stories. This can be interpreted as resulting from a communication between a literary discourse and a social discourse which points toward a common ideological foundation. It also reveals the specific “Frenchness” of a literature that is often classified as “francophone” rather than “French” literature. The study of the journalistic reception confirms this aspect by the frequent referral of its authors to their ethnic and social origins.
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| 6. |
- Axelsson, Marcus, 1979-
(författare)
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”Kalla mig inte mamsell!” : En jämförelse av tre skandinaviska översättares behandling av kulturspecifika element i fransk- och engelskspråkig skönlitteratur
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present study deals with the work and practice of three Scandinavian translators, namely Kjell Olaf Jensen (Norwegian), Marianne Öjerskog (Swedish) and Agnete Dorph Stjernfelt (Danish). The main question of the thesis is what strategies the translators use when translating culture-specific elements from French and English. Theoretically the thesis positions itself within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies and draws upon system theories as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. The method consists of a source text – target text analysis, using a somewhat modified version of Pedersen’s (2007) method identifying seven translation strategies, namely (1) retention, (2) specification, (3) direct translation, (4) generalization, (5) substitution, (6) omission and (7) official equivalent. In this thesis the three former and the official equivalent are categorized as “adequate”, whereas generalization, substitution and omission are categorized as “acceptable” using Toury’s (2012) terminology. Six different types of culture-specific elements are investigated, namely (1) titles, address and professional titles, (2) currencies, (3) weights and measures, (4) literature and music, (5) education, and (6) names. In addition to this analysis, interviews with the three translators were carried out. Results show that there are both similarities and dissimilarities in the translators’ choices of translation strategies. It also turns out that the strategies used to a great extent depend on the culture-specific element in question and hardly ever on the source language. Results also suggest that the higher the translators’ amount of accumulated total capital, the more likely it is that they adopt a heterodoxic translation strategy. Jensen and Stjernfelt are more often positioned at one of the two extremes of the adequacy–acceptability axis than is the case for Öjerskog. Moreover, results from the interviews and the text analyses show that there are a number of norms that govern the translators’ practices. The translatorial practice is to manoeuver in a field governed by norms in order to produce the best possible target texts – target texts that are true to the original and conform to domestic literary standards.
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| 7. |
- Nilsson, Magnus
(författare)
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Den moderne Ivar Lo-Johansson: Modernisering, modernitet och modernism i statarromanerna
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation examines the modernity of the Swedish proletarian author Ivar Lo-Johansson (1901-1990), as manifested in the so-called 'statare' novels: Godnatt, jord (Breaking Free, 1933), Bara en mor (Only a Mother, 1939), and Traktorn (1943). The dissertation examines, on the one hand, modernisation and modernity as the topoi of these novels, and on the other, how the author relates to the literary tendency that has come to signify the aesthetic modernisation of the 20th century, i.e. modernism. The theoretical basis of the dissertation is Marxist. The primary source of inspiration has been the model for a Marxist hermeneutics presented by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, comprising three levels of textual interpretation: the text is read, first, as an historical allegory, and second, as a statement within a class-related discourse, and, finally, in relation to the transformation of the modes of production. The accounts in the novels of modernisation and modernity are first close read and then studied in a historical context. Then the aesthetics of the novels are related to modernism. The account of modernisation and modernity in the novels is found to be fundamentally embracing, even if the negative or threatening aspects of modern society are never downplayed by the author. This position is founded in Lo-Johansson’s socialist outlook, according to which the labour movement guarantees the fulfilment of modernity’s utopian promises and avoidance of its dangers. This view is expressed by Lo-Johansson in a critical dialogue with other contemporary accounts, literary and non-literary, of modernity and modernisation. This dialogue is examined historically with the aid of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, as interpreted by Raymond Williams and other Marxist critics. First, Lo-Johansson's relationship to other literary responses to modernity and modernisation – mainly primitivism and socialist realism – is examined. Then, the 'statare' novels are related to non-literary modernist discourses, such as the ideology of the social democratic welfare state and the ideas about the new woman and the new youth. The description of the relation between the aesthetics in the 'statare' novels and modernism is focussed on the term 'social modernism'. This term was coined by Michael Denning and it signifies an attempt to redirect modernist aesthetics away from the abandonment of political, avant-garde ideals as well as the celebration of artistic autonomy, by establishing contacts with extra-literary movements who aim for a change of society. Avant-gardist and social modernist ideas were propagated in Sweden in the interwar period by socialist critics such as Ture Nerman and Arnold Ljungdal. That Lo-Johansson embraces similar ideals is showed in an analysis of three constitutive components of the aesthetics of the 'statare' novels: polyphony, facticity, and the grotesque. These stylistic traits are placed within a modernist context through comparison to the social modernist American documentarism of the 1930s , as well as to different examples of experimental modernism, such as the American non-fiction novel and the nouveau roman.
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| 8. |
- Duhan, Alice, 1986-
(författare)
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Les langues du roman translingue : Une étude de Nancy Huston, Vassilis Alexakis et Andreï Makine
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Although literary translingualism, defined as the practice of writing literature in a second language, is by no means new, it is only in the past two decades that a specialized research field has emerged around the phenomenon. Synthesizing recent developments and drawing on several existing research strands, this study sets out to examine translingual writing in French in its contemporary expressions, with a particular focus on the novel. Do contemporary writers understand their translingualism differently from their predecessors? Can translingual studies be productively put into dialogue with developments in world literature studies? And how should we understand translingual writing in relation to the theoretical “translingual turn” affecting literary studies more broadly? This dissertation argues that contemporary translingual writing in French must be understood as part of a wider shift affecting both creative and critical practices, as the forces of globalization prompt us to reassess the relationship between literature and its language(s).Following a theoretical discussion, the analysis chapters aim to shed light on contemporary understandings of translingualism as articulated in the poetics of three major authors. The chapter focusing on Nancy Huston’s bilingual novel, Danse noire, investigates forms of novelistic self-reflexivity that demonstrate a renewed attentiveness to translation as it underpins literary mimesis. What is here called her translational storytelling not only foregrounds the representation of diegetic languages, but also draws our attention to the hermeneutic processes and ethical implications of writing and reading stories which potentially reach beyond our own linguistic, geographic and social realms. The following chapter turns to the linguistic autofiction of Vassilis Alexakis. After establishing how Alexakis’ ambilingual practice – his alternation between writing in French and Greek – leads him to interrogate his own position within world literary exchanges, it analyses both his novel, Les Mots étrangers, and his collaboration on the bilingual anthology, Âtënë tî Bêafrîka. Paroles du cœur de l’Afrique, within the framework of an “uneven translingual event” (Helgesson & Kullberg). The final chapter considers the fact that Andreï Makine’s Le Testament français has come to be viewed as the archetypal French translingual novel. A reading of this novel alongside Makine’s pseudotranslations and pseudonymic works prompts an examination of the notion of translingualism as exophony, a voyage outside of the mother tongue, and of how such writing positions itself in relation to national, monolingual literary space.Previous studies of translingualism in a French context have tended to view translingual authors as language migrants, who abandon their mother tongue in favour of a monolingual literary production in French. Recent work has brought the focus back to the multilingual processes informing translingual creativity, but may have overestimated the capacity of such writing to transgress the monolingual paradigm. Drawing on work by critics such as Apter, Beecroft, Gramling and Yildiz, this dissertation shows how contemporary translingual poetics can be understood as at once the result of homogenizing forces which favour monolingual and “translatable” writing in major world languages, and as partaking in the emergence of new aesthetic practices seeking to register and respond to linguistic diversity in literature.
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| 9. |
- 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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| 10. |
- Törnqvist, Anna Clara, 1976-
(författare)
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Likt ett brustet halleluja : trons och tvivlets tematik i Christine Falkenlands prosa
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation is a study of the Christian thematics in the novels of Christine Falkenland. It has two basic aims. First, to demonstrate how Christine Falkenland writes herself into, and becomes a distinct voice in, a Christian literary tradition, while simultaneously breaking with this tradition by staging and portraying modern people’s questioning of the Christian worldview. Second, to uncover, examine, and bring together the recurring thematics, motifs, and imagery in Falkenland’s novels. Four novels – Släggan och städet (The Hammer and the Anvil; 1996), Skärvor av en sönderslagen spegel (Fragments of a Broken Mirror; 1997), Min skugga (My Shadow; 1998) and Själens begär (The Soul’s Desire; 2000) – provide a focus for the study. The novels are not seen as separate works, but as parts of a whole; they display a notable consistency in inner as well outer composition. The theoretical foundations of the study come together under three headings: thematics, intertextuality, and dialogism. By uncovering and mapping the occurrences of repeated symbols, motifs, and themes, a pattern can be discerned – a pattern which is characteristic for the oeuvre as a whole. When it comes to Christine Falkenland, it is obvious that the use of certain recurring words, symbols, and metaphors is connected to the thematic unity of the works. It is also clear that Christine Falkenland is connected to a rich textual tradition through her thematics. Through quotations and allusions, the Bible stands out as her principal intertext, but other sources can also be found, such as sadomasochistic erotic literature and Classical myth. The different voices in the texts are not in accord, but in constant discussion, fighting each other and pulling in opposite directions. Falkenland’s novels display a traditionally Christian set of problems with basic theological oppositions such as heaven–earth, body–soul, and law–gospel, oppositions which can contain praise as well as lamentation. In this manner, Christine Falkenland displays a literary portrayal of an existential position in the thematics of faith and doubt: the solitary person who fights for her faith, someone who ceaselessly sings her broken hallelujah to a hidden God.
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