This article examines Karl Ove Knausg & aring;rd's novel Morgenstjernen (2020, The Morning Star) as a series of interconnected pre-apocalyptic narratives. Using the framework of econarratology alongside the concept of 'hyperobjects' and terminology that points to the interconnectedness of all systems, I explore how the narratives we are able to tell in a changing world affect both ourselves and our relations to others. As a consequence of this, borders and categories that at first seemed stable slowly shift into new forms of hybridisation, which again fuels the cycle of narrative and interrogation.
This study analyses representations of Finland in three contemporary works: the fantasy manga and anime series Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle by Pilgrimage, and Y & omacr;ko Tawada's dystopian novel Scattered All Over the Earth. We conduct the analysis using the concepts of nation/country branding, social imaginary, and the Self-Other dichotomy. The imagined Finland, with its cultural exports and stereotypes such as sisu 'guts, perseverance', nature, and Moomins, functions as a mirror image of Japan. In our data, Finland is used to code characters, advance the plot, and understand history.
In the 1980s, the literary style of minimalism was a much-discussed and often frowned-upon topic of literary criticism. Many scholars worried that the spartan and externally oriented perspective of minimalist literature failed to address anything profound. At the epicentre of this debate was the short fiction of American authors such as Bobbie Ann Mason and Raymond Carver, whose works forged a strong link between the minimalist style and depictions of contemporary working-class life. Today, their amalgamation of minimalist aesthetics and working-class themes sees its continuation in contemporary Scandinavian literature, accompanied by a rich and significantly broadened scholarship on the movement. In particular, since the 1990s, Denmark has seen several prolific minimalist writers, many of them women. This article considers minimalist explorations of a working-class life in Helle Helle's 2005 novel R & oslash;dby-Puttgarden. Adding to the diverse readings of Scandinavian minimalism of the recent decade, it argues that the working-class protagonist in Helle's novel, Jane, constructs a 'thing language' that conflates exterior material surroundings and inner emotional experience. In so doing, the article draws on ordinary language philosophy, with an emphasis on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell.
This article juxtaposes Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman with Pillars of the Communityto illuminate the bourgeoisie's discriminatory attitudes toward the male protagonists' sordid businesses. Through this comparison, the study reveals Ibsen's differing approaches to critiquing bourgeois society across the two plays. By drawing on socio-economic and feminist theories, this analysis critically examines the social, political, and financial implications of capitalism's invisible hegemony of the bourgeoisie and the visible ideology of patriarchy, highlighting Ibsen's nuanced depiction of power dynamic within bourgeois society.
This article discusses the parallel use of nameless narrators in the works of hardboiled detectives. The two authors, both openly influenced by Chandler, create reluctant homodiegetic figures who would rather be heterodiegetic non-participants in their own lives. Tur & egrave;ll employs a journalist instead of a detective in his crime novels; Murakami's narrators are usually young men whose lives have been upended, often by a departure. The authors undermine conventional hardboiled notions by altering the standard crimenovel approach and subverting conventional depictions of 'self.' The article also focuses on reimagined urban environments and illustrates how reenvisioned landscapes surrounding these characters serve as surreal reflections of the characters' mental states. Employing noir literary devices, Tur & egrave;ll nevertheless tests the limits of what constitutes a crime novel, while Murakami transcends stereotypical notions of the 'postmodern' novel. In these efforts, the two authors resist easy classification.
In this article I will analyse Juha Hurme's carnivalistic essay novel _Niemi_, that presents a cultural history of the current region of Finland at a time when nation states had not yet been formed. I will consider the novel as a project of knowledge that places the reader between fiction and non-fiction. My interest is to analyze what kind of relationship to intellectual knowledge the work represents, and how it participates in the negotiations about the position of a novel as a producer of knowledge about the past. My argument is that although _Niemi_ utilizes propositional knowledge typical of conventional history writing, the new knowledge it produces is built from perceptions that are constituted from different narrative levels and require an interpretation and structuring of the whole. The knowledge presented in this novel therefore does not stem from facts, but more from a discussion in which truths are carnivalized and emerge more as subjective reviews. The theoretical tools of this article are based on studies of history, culture and popular history (De Groot 2016; Conroy 2015), as well as theories of literature as knowledge (Lamarque 2010; Felski 2008; Puolakka 2022).
This article analyses Finland -Swedish Monika Fagerholm's novel Vem d & ouml;dade bambi? [ Who killed bambi? my transl.] (2019) as a postmodern, fragmented story where rape is narrated as a collective trauma. In Trauma Studies, collective traumas are studied in conjunction with either the Holocaust (Fareld 2010, Laub 1992) or colonialism (Forter 2014), while the trauma of sexual violence is considered an individual trauma (Brown 1995, Caruth 1996, Tal 1996). Contrary to this, in Fagerholm's novel, collectivity - both as theme and as form - permeates the novel on at least three levels: Firstly, as a trauma involving a whole small-town community, secondly as subjects constituted by their collectivity, and thirdly on a stylistic level through the use of intertextuality, fragments, dialogism, and heteroglossia. In order to analyse how such a collectivity works in Fagerholm's rape narrative I turn to Michail Baktin's narratological concepts dialogism , how the novel as a narrative format consists of several voices; and heteroglossia , the idea of language a process consisting of multiple layers and different narrative positions, combining future and former languages (Bakhtin 1981) as well as to Kristian Shaw's and Sara Upstone's use of the feminist narratological term transglossic , how multiple layers in a novel becomes meaningful in that they offer alternatives to established storylines, and the political aspects of such an approach to narrativity (2021). The article shows that rape is narrated as collective on three different levels in Fagerholm's novel: the collectivity of the small-town community, collectivity within individuals, and collective stylistics. Rape is narrated via Fagerholm's fragmented style, and this results in a complex narrative structure that reveals how language is part of the collective structures that make rape possible.
This article explores P.C. Jersild's metafictive maneuvers in his 2012 novel, Ypsilon. The fates of nine characters from nine of Jersild's novels are intertwined in this story which serves as a prequel to his novel, En levande sj & auml;l. In addition, Jersild provides reflections on the rules of fiction and his feelings about being an author. Playful fabulation is, however, contrasted with clinically realistic descriptions of suffering and death. The text is playful, but the purpose is serious. The ethics of euthanasia are explored, and Jersild continues to interest himself in the essence of identity, self, and humanity, as well as the toll upon individuals who find themselves in the power of impersonal bureaucracy. Jersild writes postmodern prose with a social purpose.
Lindow emphasises early in this book that in Old Norse mythology, for which canonical texts are lacking, we frequently find 'numerous versions of the same story, […] often contradicting one other (sic) in ways great and small ' (pp vii-viii; cf.pp.64, 116).This is especially well illustrated in Chapter 2, where Lindow steers a careful course among various versions of the story of the god Þórrʼs fishing expedition, as will be shown below.Referring in his Introduction to the carmina (songs) mentioned by Tacitus in his Germania (c. 100 CE), Lindow sees these as the likely ancestors of Germanic alliterative poetry, including Old Norse poetry, both eddic and skaldic (for which latter term he prefers Old Norse dróttkvaett 'recited before a retinue'), in which much of the mythology was transmitted orally before being given written form by such antiquaries as Saxo Grammaticus (c.1200), Snorri Sturluson (d.1241), and the anonymous redactor of the collection containing most of what is known as the Poetic Edda (c.1250?).In Chapter 1 he presents the mythology as a system, as far as this is possible given the nature of the sources, following the examples of the eddic poem Vǫluspá and the Gylfaginning section of Snorriʼs prose Edda in tracing the mythic history of the cosmos from its creation to its destruction at Ragnarøk and rebirth.The story of Þórr's encounter with the world serpent while fishing, the subject of Chapter 2, is preserved in versions depicted on stone monuments mostly from the Viking Age (c.800-1100, cf.p. 1), as well as in dróttkvaett poetry, in the eddic poem Hymiskviða, and in Gylfaginning.Of the pictorial stone versions Lindow considers the runestone from Altuna, Sweden (mid or later 11th century, p. 84), the picture stone from Hørdum, north Jutland (?8th-11th century, p. 84), and two somewhat more doubtful cases (see p. 83): the stone slab from Gosforth in northern England (most likely 10th century, p. 86), and the picture stone Ardre VIII, from Ardre, on the Swedish island of Gotland (8th or 9th century, p. 87).The relevant dróttkvaett poems are what is preserved of Ragnarsdrápa by the Norwegian poet Bragi Boddason (9th century, p. 70), of Húsdrápa by the Icelander Úlfr Uggason (late 10th century, pp.56, 75), and of poems by Ǫlvir hnúfa, a court poet of Haraldr hárfagri (d.c. 930, p. 74) and by Eysteinn Valdason and Gamli gnaevaðarskáld (both thought to have been active in Iceland towards the end of the pre-Christian period, i.e. in the late
By Rory McTurk. ÁRMANN JAKOBSSON AND MIRIAM MAYBURD (eds.): Paranormal Encounters in Iceland 1150–1400. Walter de Gruyter, Boston/Berlin; Western Michigan University Medieval Institute Publications 2020. Pp. viii + 438. 2 figs. ISBN 978-1-58044-329-6.
The emergence of the Avant-gardes at the turn of the twentieth century brought with it a transformation of the Nordic pastoral tradition, remodelled as resolutely modern poetics, which we propose to consider under the name Boreal Imaginism. We will examine different avant-garde movements, the fashioning of their names and their aesthetic projects, which will allow us to theorise Boreal Imaginism in a transnational perspective: Anglo-American Imagism theorised by Ezra Pound in his 1912 manifesto, as a poetic movement founded on the creation of images in the form of visual snapshots, epitomised by Wallace Stevens's poem "The Snow Man"; the Russian Imagism of the 1910s and 20s; the Imaginisterna, a group formed by Swedish artists C.O. Hulten, Max Walter Svanberg and Anders Osterlin between 1945 and 1955; Le Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus imaginiste developed by the Danish artist Asger Jorn in 1954; and Christian Dotremont's "Imagineiges". At the intersection of these different avantgarde movements, the concept of a Boreal Imagism will allow us to theorise the reworking of traditional boreal tropes through an aesthetic experimentation that is resolutely modernist. In the context of the current debate on ecocriticism and nature writing, this article will seek to explore the possible lines of transmission between the historical avant-gardes and the post-WWII Nordic experimental movements.
The recently developed theory of borealism invites us to consider the study of representations of the North in terms of reception, interaction, and observer positions. This article places the theory of borealism in relation to other disciplines and links it to the pedagogical model of concrete experiences, allowing for an understanding of boreal dynamics and the mechanisms of reception and the cultural circulation of borealism. It is necessary to consider the endogenous and exogenous perspectives of the observer, as well as their way of learning about and processing the North, to understand cultural products linked to the North and our interactions with them.
