Scandinavistica Vilnensis
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Kroppsminne och kollektiv erfarenhet: Objektiveringens betydelse för produktionen av arbetarlitteraritet
Full text linkLiterature is the memory of a culture: whether included in the canon or not, it testifies to conceptions, mentalities, and conditions in its time. Working-class literature is a young literary type, that for long was excluded from the canon and recognized literary tradition, and therefore has a special relationship to memory, experience, and culture. The first Swedish working-class writers were self-taught, without access to the bourgeois cultural heritage. They were workers, writing about workers, for workers and addressing the class collective. But they were also individuals, who started from their own memories and experiences. How did they go about making their own thing a matter for the whole class? How did they integrate the personal into a collective memory culture? That is the main issue in my article. The task is to shed light on the relationship between individual experience and collective memory in the first generation of Swedish working-class prose around 1910.I will dive into this subject matter by employing the notion of literary objectification, understood as creating vivid images, scenes, and situations from personal memories and experiences serving as an objective correlate (T.S. Eliot). The function of this correlate is to evoke recognition at a distance in the implied reader: an alienated recognition (Viktor Shklovsky), or a kind of sustained Verfremdung (Bertolt Brecht), which also includes contemplation and reflection. A working objective correlate, as I understand it here, must be based on some form of collective memory. I want to develop this idea with the support of memory studies, specifically, works by cultural researcher Jan Assmann and phenomenologist Thomas Fuchs.
The reasoning will then be tested on some text examples from the working-class authors Dan Andersson (1888–1920), Maria Sandel (1870–1927), and Karl Östman (1876–1953). In particular, I will dwell on depictions of physical labour, the body memories that are objectified, and the extent to which such objectification produces a special proletarian literariness
Photoliterary Memoryscape of Tomas Espedal: Mitt privatliv (2014) – a Starting Point in a Journey to One’s Past
Full text linkPhotography is inextricably coupled with temporal conditions. It is rooted in the past while concurrently referring to the recipient’s present and future. This article sheds light on the connection between photography, literature, and memory in Tomas Espedal’s photo book Mitt privatliv (2014; My private life). The central perspective of this paper is devoted to the link between the lyrical subject’s autobiographical memory and the individual memory of the reader. My goal is to analyze how the reader finds their point of view while confronted with the lyrical subject’s memoryscape from aesthetic, anthropological, and cognitive perspectives. Firstly, I discuss the form of Espedal’s Mitt privatliv and the book’s potential liberatic character. Secondly, in reference to François Soulages and John Berger, I show how the correlation between texts and photography affects memory functioning in a photobook. Finally, I ocus on the mechanisms of autobiographical memory, or, more precisely, how the subject’s and recipient’s memories relate to the book’s physicality, structure, and the interplay between the word and photography. Looking through the lenses of Paul Ricoeur, Aleida Assmann, and the social-communicative functions of memory, it turns out that Mitt privatliv is not just a created and closed story of a single subject; it is a story that stimulates the reader’s memory and thus impacts their understanding and constitution of their “self” in both individual and collective contexts
Minnets mönster och former: Minne och identitet i Linnea Axelssons epos Ædnan
Full text linkThe article addresses the problem of memory and its role in shaping ethnic identity as shown in the epic poem Ædnan (2018) by Linnea Axelsson. I approach the poem from the postcolonial perspective focusing on Swedish policy towards the Sámi people, who were deprived of their land, culture, and identity. Various patterns of memory are embodied by the complex time structure of the poem. Its three parts follow three generations of the Sámi people. The first lost their cultural identity as a result of the colonisation of Northern Sweden and the hegemonic discourse against nomadic people. They became the Other for the dominant culture, and an object for disciplinary power. Next generation, which was supposed to assimilate with the Swedish society, felt rootless because their tradition had disappeared from collective memory. The third generation started struggling for their rights as an ethnic group constructing post-memory based on material traces and oral testimonies of the Sámi tradition. Last but not least, the choice of genre is significant, as it refers to the Western archive as a paradigm for memory culture. Thus, I regard the poem as an attempt to establish and explore an archive of the Sámi, which recognises the ethnic identity of the Sámi people on other grounds than the Western tradition does
Memories for the Future? An Ecocritical Reading of Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water. A History of Our Future (2019)
Full text linkAndri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water. A History of Our Future, categorized as a novel when nominated for the Nordic Literary Prize in 2020, is a unique contribution to cli-fi literature and the understanding of climate change. A generic hybrid of autobiography, stories, myths, family- and Icelandic history and culture interwoven with references to international cultures, scientific discussions and evidence-based material, the novel spans times and places and addresses the future. Applying theories from ecocriticism and memory studies, the article explores how the compositional complexity of the book, including its mental time travels, contributes to the production of images of the future
Presenting Norwegian Literature in Czechoslovakia: Norwegian Literature in Czech Translations 1945–1968
Full text linkTranslations contribute to spreading but also shaping of cultural memory. While the choice of titles which get to be translated is contingent on many factors which the publishers take into consideration, decision-making in totalitarian countries is fettered. In communist Czechoslovakia, the final selection of books, and therefore memories, had to meet yet another criterion which deformed the natural literary development – censorship. The article focuses on Norwegian literature which was introduced into Czech between 1945 and 1968. Norwegian literature had already had a strong position on the Czechoslovak literary market since the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century thanks to several publishing houses, translators, and the introduction of the Nobel Prize in literature. This tradition was first interrupted by the WWII and shortly after again by the communist coup in 1948. Although the restrictions began loosening later, the Soviet intervention in 1968 installed the restrictions again.The object is to present and examine the image of Norwegian literature in Czech literary memory as it was shaped by the cultural policies of totalitarian Czechoslovakia; and to show and explain which type of literature could enter Czech bookshops and libraries. The focus often shifted to a specific literary genre, republishing the earlier works of the Norwegian canon, or works by authors whose work was translated into Czech although they were marginalized in Norway and did not make it into the Norwegian national canon. An important part of such a perception is not only remembering but also forgetting. The article therefore also maps the active suppressing of memories by black-listing particular authors or works.Lastly, the article is also concerned with peritexts of translation, namely introductions and afterwords, as these often contributed to mediation of the transfer
IASS’ historie: En personlig fortelling
Full text linkAs the official historian of the International Association for Scandinavian Studies, and one of the two authors of The History of the International Association of Scandinavian Studies 1956–2006, I have been asked to tell the story of the almost 70 years of our association’s existence. The whole thing began in Cambridge in July 1956, as an informal meeting of 65 academics, most of them from the Nordic countries or the United Kingdom; on that occasion there was a grand total of 13 lectures. Since that time there has been a conference every other summer – until the summer of 2020, when it had to be postponed for a year due to the pandemic. It was agreed from the very earliest days that the meetings would be held in a Nordic country and a non-Nordic country alternately, although it was not until 1962, in Aarhus, that IASS was given its official name, and supplied with a constitution and a committee (president, secretary, treasurer etc.) For the early conferences the theme was exclusively literary, but in more recent times it has been expanded to take in other disciplines, such as history, sociology, film studies etc. In 1986 Elias Bredsdorff published a slim volume about the first thirty years of IASS, which I supplemented in 2006 with an account of the following twenty years. I have attended every single conference since 1970, so my talk will provide an extremely personal account of how IASS has become a part of my own history
Listening to the Enemy: Challenging The National Narrative of World War II in Contemporary Norwegian Fiction
Full text linkThis article analyses five Norwegian novels that all incorporate German soldiers’ experiences as an important part of the Norwegian story of World War II. Abandoning the strong focus on antagonistic relationships of previous narratives, the five novels analysed in this article represent a new approach to the history of the war that aims to view the enemy through what Bull and Hansen (2016) have called agonistic memory, which includes the perspective of the perpetrator to understand conflicts.Previously, when Norwegian authors included German soldiers in narratives about World War II, it was part of a general portrait of the enemy. The individual soldier has few distinct features and no independent identity. These portraits followed the hegemonic Norwegian narrative of the occupation: The good Norwegians, who were part of the home front, versus the Germans and the morally inferior Norwegians who supported them. However, in the last ten years, several novels have revisited the war narrative through representations of previously neglected groups, one of which is the German soldier. The five novels have quite different approaches, but they all question the traditional Norwegian war narrative through complex representations of the enemy. My analysis of the five texts will identify how the texts challenge the conventional history of the occupation through an agonistic perspective that aims to revisit how the war is remembered. These representations of the German soldiers are a central part of the new examination of the long shadows cast by the memories of war in Norway
Writing Sámi Memory and Trauma into Swedish History: Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan. Epos (2018) and Elin Anna Labba’s Herrarna Satte Oss Hit. Om Tvångsförflyttningar i Sverige (2020)
Full text linkAfter Sweden and Norway signed the reindeer grazing convention agreement in 1919, reindeer-herding Sámi families selected by the Swedish authorities were forced to migrate from the Karesuando area in Norway to more southern regions within the reindeer husbandry area in Sweden. These relocations at the beginning of the twentieth century are the source of memory and trauma in both Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan. Epos (2018; Ædnan. An Epic) and Elin Anna Labba’s Herrarna satte oss hit. Om tvångsförflyttningar i Sverige (2020; The Masters Put Us Here. On Forced Relocations in Sweden). Furthermore, the two works contain paratextual fragments that express the desire to make the silenced past of the Sámi audible in Swedish history. Each text transmits memories and traumas from different genre perspectives: those of poetry and partly autobiographical non-fiction. The texts reveal processes of colonization and oppression within national borders, with scientific racism as an underlying ideology.In this contribution also a methodological issue will be discussed. How should we study texts that deal with writing about trauma and memory of a minority people such as the Sámi? An indigenous methodology, as presented by authors such as Jelena Porsanger in “An Essay about Indigenous Methodology” (2004), should be an important guide, as it concerns a respectful approach to the study of indigenous minority people.
Kaj Munk’s “De Faldne” – Memorial Poem and Monument Inscription
Full text linkOn 29 August 1943, the Danish government resigned. The German Wehrmacht was to take immediate control of the Danish Army and Navy. Under widespread fighting against this “takeover,” 23 Danish soldiers and two civilians were killed, and a further 53 were wounded. Munk promptly wrote the poem “De Faldne” in memory of the soldiers killed in the assault on the Danish Army and Navy. In Munk’s wartime oeuvre, some dramas, poems and memoir work, implying a subtle, indirect appeal to resistance, have proved to be viable. His “direct” resistance poetry appears to be more time-bound.
“De Faldne,” however, is a special case. It is one of his best “direct,” activist poems. As an inscription on memorials, it is sometimes referred to in ceremonial speeches, but it has remained untreated in the few serious recent readings of Munk’s resistance literature. It is therefore an aim of the present article to fill in a gap. When Munk wrote this memorial poem, he had already – through the open, resolute will to confront the occupiers which he had advocated at every possible occasion after 9 April 1940 – achieved a unique status as a national resistance icon. This status was further cemented when he himself joined the ranks of “De Faldne.” During the night of 4 January 1944, he was arrested and killed. His funeral became a national event, and the brutal murder indeed strengthened rather than weakened the will to resistance.
“De Faldne” began to exert a strong and lasting influence on the construction of the collective memory of World War II and the Occupation when, after the Liberation, the first stanza was carved as an inscription in two places at the central memorial site for those killed in the freedom struggle, Mindelunden in Ryvangen. This first stanza was moreover used on a considerable number of memorial stones erected on local initiative throughout the country. The present article offers an analysis of its important role in the memory culture of the Occupation, both through its concrete presence on numerous monuments and as part of a wider memorial culture with ceremonial anniversaries and commemoration days like 9 April (the Occupation, 1940), 4–5 May (the Liberation, 1945), and 29 August (the end of the politics of cooperation, 1943).
This commemorative culture has retained its public appeal, perhaps even growing more important in recent years due to the shift toward a more activist Danish foreign policy since the 1990s. Quite recently, several of the monuments with Munk’s words as an inscription have been revitalised and enhanced by musical and visual dimensions transmitted by new, digital forms of communication. Through the modification of this cultural heritage, Munk’s words, as well as his fate, have become audible and visible in new ways
Writing a Letter to One’s Muse: Genre Memory and Epistolography in Carl August Thielo’s Enveloppens eller Saloppens forunderlige Hændelser (1763)
Full text linkEpistolary texts are often incorporated into 18th-century prose literature, but only rarely do they self-referentially discuss intertextuality as the mimesis of memory (Neumann 2005; 2008). Carl August Thielo’s “comic novel” uses a letter to the Muse to juxtapose a writer’s reliance on literary memoria and the demand for innovation.Drawing on Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s (1984) term “genre memory,” this paper examines the relationship between memory, generic hybridity and epistolography. Genre memory describes how, through the process of “novelization,” genres are incorporated and contemporised by the novel. Creative genre memory drives innovation by giving the most archaic generic elements a voice in narration and by establishing a ground for their hybrid interplay, thus producing a semantic surplus. By connecting this approach to epistolography, generic hybridity is illustrated as a product of material and narrative practices.In lieu of a preface to the reader, Thielo’s text begins with a Muse letter asking for assistance with the poetic work. This opens a discussion of generic differences and similarities, as well as the workings of intertextuality. At the same time, the engagement of texts with literary history is visualised via addresses to a mythical being belonging to literature’s memoria. Hence, the Muse letter depicts how poetical inventio builds on intertextuality to spark inspiration, thereby materialising the otherwise invisible, but crucial stage of writing before writing.This article serves to elaborate a first understanding of novelised epistolography and its potential for literary memory studies, which emphasises material and paratextual aspects over purely linguistic elements