Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia
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“If Sweden is a province, what are we?” Map-making and man-making in Marius Ivaškevičius’s essay series My Scandinavia
Full text linkThis co-written article approaches the influential Lithuanian writer and playwright Marius Ivaškevičius’s essay series My Scandinavia (2004) from two different vantage points reflecting either side of the former ‘Iron Curtain’. Published in the year when Lithuania joined the European Union, the essay series describes the narrator’s travels and symbolic and ironic conquest of Northern Europe in the wake of the border openings following the collapse of the Soviet Union. First, employing the notions of “temporal” and “spatial nodes” (Ringgard & DuBois 2017), the article addresses how the crossings of the Baltic Sea and journeys through Northern Europe depicted in Ivaškevičius’s essays represent an awareness of significant shifts in the unfolding of European history and Europe’s spatial configuration. Second, the article reads My Scandinavia as an example of creative map-making in line with theories of critical cartography. Finally, the article puts the travelling subject in My Scandinavia centre stage, looking at the dialectic ways in which subject and place create each other. Just as Scandinavia has been actively moulding the narrating and, by implication, also the writing subject’s biography, so has he given Scandinavia shape through his discourse, while also idiosyncratically framing Europe’s shifting political and mental geography
Coming to terms with the North. Scandinavia in Polish culture at the turn of the 21st century
Full text linkThe article deals with representations of Scandinavia in Polish literature from the 1980s to the second decade of the 21st century. The basic claim of the article is that a shift in the Polish imagination from the West to the North has occurred through literature and growing public interest. This shift began with efforts to transform the initial stereotype of Scandinavia as a land of prosperity. In subsequent stages, the imaginary was expanded by literature to include the themes of equality, social trust and self-correcting modernity. Complicating the image of Scandinavia made it into a viable alternative to Western modernity
Stepping from College Classrooms to the Political Front. The Emergence of Feminism in the Norwegian Maoist Movement before 1973
Full text linkThe aim of this article is to investigate the origins of the Women’s Front, a women’s movement co-founded by Norwegian Maoists in the 1970s. The analysis seeks to capture the dynamics of women’s activism in relation to the broader political landscape and, concurrently, to understand the Women’s Front in a broader temporal perspective. The sources used were newspapers and publications issued by different branches of the Norwegian Maoist movement. Women’s politics are analysed both as a grassroots phenomenon and a part of agitation which emerged under the 1972 anti-EEC campaign. This makes it possible to show how women’s politics found a place on the agenda of Norwegian Maoism and what kind of obstacles it had to face on its way to gaining autonomy. The patterns of feminist mobilisation demonstrated by this analysis can make a contribution to the broader debate on the role and place of feminism in traditional political structures
“Let’s have a cup of tea” – Scandinavian crime fiction through Hungarian eyes. Zoltán Kőhalmi’s practical guide to crime writers
Full text linkIn recent decades, a wide range of Scandinavian crime novels have conquered Hungarian readers, providing a more sophisticated perspective on the existing image of Scandinavian cultures and societies, with their intriguing social content and appealing landscapes. This wave of crime fiction has not only contributed to a better understanding of Scandinavia, but also drawn attention to the genre itself, which culminated in a parody written by a Hungarian stand-up comedian, Zoltán Kőhalmi. In his incorporation of all the obligatory ingredients of Scandinavian crime novels, the comedian not only reuses the self-image that Scandinavian crime narratives convey, he pillories the genre requirements by exaggerating the use of the most well-known characteristics. The analysis of Kőhalmi’s satirical use of Scandinavian crime narratives serves as a case study for a closer understanding of conceptions of Scandinavia in contemporary Hungary
A transnational regioscape in the making. The Baltic Sea in Christian Petzold’s Barbara and Ilze Burkovska-Jacobsen’s My Favorite War
Full text linkThe Baltic Sea has effectively separated the Scandinavian and Eastern European countries, especially in the period when this body of water constituted a part of the Iron Curtain and functioned for Scandinavians as an imaginary protective moat. From the East-Central European perspective, the Baltic Sea offered a hope of escape to freedom, encapsulated in the cinematic trope of the sea as a ‘blue boundary’, or a ‘horizon of hope’. But the Baltic Sea was also feared as a life-threatening border, as expressed in the trope of ‘Baltic noir’, a variation of the ‘Eastern noir’ trope (Mrozewicz 2018) – imagining the sea in nocturnal scenery as wild and under state control. The article discusses screen representations of the Baltic Sea understood as performative regioscaping practices (Chow 2021), offering insights into the memories and histories of human mobilities across the Baltic Sea beyond official narratives, as well as into the human relationship with the sea as both a cultural boundary and material body of water. As demonstrated by the analyzed film examples, Christian Petzold’s Barbara (2012, Germany) and Ilze Burkovska-Jacobsen’s My Favorite War (2020, Norway, Latvia), the Baltic Sea continues to be an important spatiotemporal node in the transnational re-telling of the region’s history and identity
What kind of place is Norden? The image of Norden in Polish literary reviews of Nordic literature
Full text linkThe article discusses the question of how Nordic literature in translation – as reflected in Polish literary reviews – creates Norden as a place. What kind of imagery (constructed in a continuous discursive process) is projected on the Nordic region, and what purposes does this construction serve? The analysis draws on an understanding of place as a construct based on “body, landscape and culture” (Ringgaard & DuBois 2017:20) and uses concepts taken from imagology and literary reception studies
Svenska generiska pronomen hos finska språkbadselever. En jämförelse mellan två årskurser
Full text linkThis is a study of the use of generic pronouns in Swedish as a second language (L2) by L1 Finnish immersion students. We compare two groups, 12-year-olds, and 15-year-olds, to see if there is a difference and to identify which the most challenging cases are in both groups. Norm deviations are compared to see if they mainly consist of overuse of generic pronouns or more formal aspects, such as the pronoun which is chosen, and the understanding of the relation between the generic subject, object, possessive and reflexive pronouns. Both groups use generic pronouns in the subject position in a manner which mostly follows the standard, and mainly have problems with possessive pronouns in connection to generic pronouns. It is possible that object generic pronouns would also be problematic, but there are none in our data. Generic pronouns are sometimes left out as subjects, which is ungrammatical in Swedish. There is also occasional overuse of man where it is not idiomatic, and some mixed forms with man and s-passive. Results show possible transfer from the first language (L1) of the learners, but less in the older group. Furthermore, there also appears to be transfer from L3 English, which our informants are learning at school. This seems more present in the older group
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Full text linkBefore the age of mass media and mass travel (including tourism), cultural stereotypes were formed and communicated predominantly utilizing literature and other written sources (Fischer 1987). Nowadays, people travel extensively; they can get direct information from radio, television, and social media, yet stereotypes still seem to prevail. The general Czech contemporary notion of Scandinavian societies comes to the fore in the reviews of translated Scandinavian literature and Scandinavian (or Nordic) films, written by professionals and published in the edited press or the largely unedited social media. In these reviews, one can discern certain paradigms that doubtlessly amount to stereotypes. In this article, I will present a qualitative discourse analysis of Scandinavian stereotypes in the Czech reception of the Scandinavian arts, especially literature, taking into account the intertextual and contextual aspects of the Scandinavian ethnotypes occurring in reviews and paratexts in Czech mass media. I focus on two explicitly addressed images: The emancipated Scandinavian woman, and the alleged Scandinavian egalitarianism. Finally, I will resort to Tzvetan Todorov’s typology of relations to the Other. I will try to explain the activist criticism of Czech reviewers, who tend to compare the Czech situation with the Scandinavian one, using Todorov’s three axes describing the relation to alterity
Somewhere between Malmö and Copenhagen: Inter-spaces in Marius Ivaškevičius’ play Close City
Full text linkIn the drama Close City, first published in 2005, Lithuanian playwright Marius Ivaškevičius focuses on the (im)possible connections between Malmö and Copenhagen. The initially realistic setting of a failing marriage in the spirit of August Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman evolves gradually into an absurd spectacle that explores spatial and intertextual interstices. This article investigates how the drama, as a scenic kaleidoscope, elaborates on the influence of imagined geographies in the Baltic Sea region, discusses (gendered) power relations, and questions Scandinavian exceptionalism
Surface transfer in the acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 Swedish. A longitudinal study
Full text linkThis longitudinal study explores two specific aspects of the acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 Swedish: the use of a default gender and surface transfer. Twenty-one L1 Polish university students of L2 Swedish were tested by means of an untimed gender assignment task after two, three, and four semesters of studying. The data were analysed using a two-way ANOVA for repeated measures. Participants had more success in assigning gender to Swedish nouns that shared gender across Polish and Swedish than to Swedish nouns that differed in gender across the two languages, regardless of length of experience in learning Swedish. Contrary to previous studies that observed overgeneralisation of uter gender forms in production, this study did not identify the tendency to use uter as a default, presumably because participants had unlimited time to perform the task. This finding points to a dissociation between the knowledge of grammatical gender and the ability to use it during processing