This article explores ecocritical aspects of the novel Lopa varg (2021, Eng. The Wolf Run), by Kerstin Ekman, using postcritique and Rita Felski's theories on the aesthetic experience to highlight the attachments and entanglements formed between reader, text, and context. The cross-species relationship between the protagonist Ulf and the wolf character Hogben is key to the depiction of nature in the novel. Various narrative techniques convey an intimacy with Ulf, encouraging the reader to engage with his experience of nature and his encounter with the wolf. Furthermore, the wolf encounter serves as a catalyst for various societal and environmental themes, notably climate change, thereby offering readers yet more points of connection. While not proposing a definitive solution to the complex issues and conflicts addressed in the novel, Ekman encourages an attitude of awareness towards animals and nature. This awareness and sensitivity can also be linked to the attentive reader and the attachments that bestow literature with affective meaning.
The present article deals with the Swedish perception of Germany in the context of World War I. It posits the thesis that the starting point of the transformation in the Swedish perception of Germany-from a romantic and affinity-based perspective to a distant and noticeably cooled one-can be traced back to the First World War. The article sheds light on the political background within Sweden and demonstrates, through two thematic complexes-the & raquo;Ideas of 1914<< and the complex of the & raquo;racial<< or racist charge of the war-, how the World War was elevated to a decisive battle for the future of Europe and Sweden. The argumentation is grounded in contemporary journalism, including newspaper coverage of varying political orientations, as well as publications by central political and intellectual figures in Sweden during the 1910s.
The article examines how Poland's struggle for independence is represented in Norwegian literature during the period 1814-1905. It focuses on the political and historical narratives embedded in Norwegian lyrical texts within the so-called ImagiNation corpus. Using both traditional qualitative methods and quantitative approaches from digital humanities, it highlights how the Polish fight for freedom resonated with Norway's national identity formation. By analyzing poems about Poland's uprisings and figures like Emilia Plater, Tadeusz Ko & sacute;ciuszko and the Russian tsar, the study explores how Norwegian poets used Poland's suffering and resilience as a metaphor for broader themes of freedom, justice, and resistance and how those narratives possibly influence the emerging Norwegian national identity.
This contribution analyses how an Old Norse poem such as Atlakvi & eth;a can be read as a >> construction site<< within which various social tensions are explored. It argues that the poem is intensely concerned with behavioural norms, kinship ties, and the role of women in a feud culture, concerns which would have spoken to the 13(th)-century audience of the text as it survives in the Codex Regius, and which eventually come to a head in the character of Gu & eth;r & uacute;n. The contribution posits that each of these concerns is a source of irresolvable tension that reaches breaking point during Gu & eth;run's revenge, where the careful choice of words, specifically afkar(r) and ni & eth;, signals a collapse of society.
Scholars in the humanities interested in how the fertile concept of the parasite can shed light on works of literature and other cultural products, have several theoretical resources they can draw upon. This article compares three of the most important ones, in order to discuss their similarities and differences, and also to bring out their respective strengths and weaknesses: the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres' work, and advances in biological thought following from Leigh Van Valen's so-called >> Red Queen hypothesis <<. Even if Serres offers a more comprehensive understanding of the parasite than does Derrida, the latter's insights are still needed. As I argue in the article, the reason is that they can help counter an unfortunate tendency in Serres' writings that has led to his book The Parasite being read in two opposed, but equally problematical ways. My central claim is that the most productive starting point for a better theory of the parasite is to be found in the triangulation of insights from Serres, Derrida, and the Red Queen.
Jacob (1891) is Alexander Kielland's last novel. From the perspective of a culturally and intellectually superior individual, it portrays a sick, thoroughly capitalistic society lacking any moral. The text specifies and contextualizes this diagnosis by focusing on the protagonist of the novel: T & oslash;rres. He is interpreted as the personification of collective antagonist who stands in opposition to the >> great man << in the elite discourse of the late 19th century: >> the masses <<. The economic and social danger posed by the masses is conveyed in Jacob primarily through pictorial language of the parasitic. The author will show that T & oslash;rres is infecting more and more parts of the society, and, by the end of the novel, even threatens to grow beyond the diegesis.
Drawing on several texts by literary authors in the Swedish newspaper DagensNyheterthat are linked to both actual terror attacks in contemporary Scandinavian history and novels (by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Johannes Anyuru and Jan Kj ae rstad), the article traces aspects ofthe tripartite communication structure ofliterature, mass media and terror and shows that it has parasitic features. Caught in the paradox ofneither being able to completely evade nor completely surrender to the attention constraints ofterror (after all, even rejection affirms the intended fear effect), the texts discussed here position themselves, the article argues, as parasites >next to << terror.
In this article, I will examine the phenomenon ofparasitic narration in Sami Said's novel V & auml;ldigt s & auml;llan fin (2012) using Michel Serres's concept ofthe parasite. My observations are based on the premise that the novel's first-person narrator (Noha) shows a dichotomous understanding ofthe selfas opposed to another that can be understood as an I/non-I construct. However, he repeatedly undermines this difference and thereby proves unreliable. I will show that this unreliability provides the basis for productively changing his social conception and therefore his narration. The study particularly focuses on the we-narratives oftwo characters that run counter to Noha's I/non-I construct and implement complex narrative situations that can be described as >> parasitic << in Serres's sense.
Thisarticle introduces the concept of>parasitism << to eighteenth-century Nordic literature and argues for the parasitic nature ofparatexts in the novel. Drawing on the ancient Greek term parasitosand the theories ofMichel Serres and Mikhail Bakhtin, the article shows how the novelistic prose disrupts and revitalizes canonized genre systems: By inserting extraliterary languages (e.g. epistolary) into the novelistic, these are re-contextualized, drawing attention to the medium and the narrativity ofliterature. C. A. Thielo's Charlotte eller forunderlige Tildragelser med Fr & oslash;kenWeisens & oslash;eund Eir & iacute;kur Laxdal's & Oacute;landssaga are chosen to illustrate the extent to which the concept of parasitism can be useful to describe the transformations in eighteenth-century Nordic literature.
Since the 19th century, the question of purity has been a risk area in the German search for identity. It oscillates between hygienic and racial ideological content. The latter achieved virulence when, from the 19th century onwards, Scandinavia became a place of longing for (racial) purity in the German v & ouml;lkisch milieu, due to its own sense of deficit. The self-attribution of purity is also inherent to the Scandinavian discourse. There, however, the German longing for purity was met with little approval. Under National Socialism it developed into a reason of state. After 1945 it remained as a propaganda element of the political right, but also as a model of thinking in the societal mainstream.
The conference >>>Literary Prize culture in the Nordic Countries. Prizes as Engines of Comparison was held at the Ludwig Maximillians-Universit & auml;t in Munich between the 5(th) and 7(t)h October 2023, fittingly coinciding with the announcement of the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse as this year's Nobel Prize winner. While the Swedish Nobel Prize is the best-known literary prize worldwide, receiving a massive amount of attention in the media each year, and research on the Nobel has been flourishing in recent times, the broader landscape of literary prizes in the Nordic countries has remained underexplored by scholars. The aim of the conference was to scrutinize the variety. function, and significance of literary prizes in this region and to bring the ecology of literary prizes into sharper focus.
The article presents Rakel Haslund Gjerrild's novel Alle himlens fugle (2020) as a Scandinavian example of flood fiction, a genre that has been attracting scholarly attention in recent years. After a short outline of the current discourse on flood fiction, the novel will be analyzed with a focus on its depiction of the ocean and its intertextual dimensions. I will argue that Alle himlens fugle renders a paradox by showing the precarity of cultural artifacts, especially language, in the Anthropocene on the one hand, while promoting the durability of canonical works of fiction on the other. This paradox makes it fruitful in the context of blue humanities approaches.
Alexander Kielland's first novel, Garman & Worse (1880), is considered today part of the Norwegian literary canon. Although the role of the ocean in this novel has already been analysed, most discussions limit themselves to its metaphorical dimension. This paper proposes a Marxist ecological reading of the novel. Considering the depiction of the ocean and two storylines - the unfulfilled romantic relation between Madelaine and Per, as well as the building ofa sailboat - I argue that the novel shows a complex negotiation with real social and metabolic changes that were occurring in Stavanger. At the time the novel was written, capitalism and the fossil economy were expanding and exerting pressure on Norwegian coastal communities, which in turn were affecting the way the ocean was being imagined and experienced. Kielland, however, is still able to establish a harmonic metabolic relation with the ocean in the figure of Per, as well as a way for a benevolent capitalism embodied first by Christian Fredrik Garman and later by his younger son, Gabriel.
This article explores women's relationship to the sea and contributes with a gender perspective to Humanistic Ocean studies. In Swedish author Sara Stridsberg's novel Happy Sally (2004) and Norwegian author Inger Bratveit's Dette er ogsa vatn (2018), the themes of motherhood and marriage are connected to the motif of swimming in the sea. The texts include memories, diary entries, and essayistic thoughts of the narrators, as well as excerpts from other authors. Swimming in the sea is interpreted by the narrators as a metaphor for the desire to transcend the life as mother, daughter, sister, and wife, while simultaneously reminding of their responsibilities to others and the surroundings. Swimming is understood as a process of mourning, that contributes to the acknowledgment of human finitude.
To this day, Hans Kirk's novel Fiskerne(1928, The Fishermen, 1999) is very popular in Denmark. It has also repeatedly aroused interest in literary studies: While it was read against the background of psychoanalysis and criticism of religion in the 1930s, Marxist literary criticism of the 1970s received it as an example of socialist literature. These two approaches focus on the inner life and social interaction of the characters but ignore the importance of the physical environment in the novel. This article sees the main characters' failed struggle against >> nature <<, with the aim of dominating it, as the novel's central theme. >> Nature <<, I argue, proves to be a religious construct that organizes both the environmental relationships and the inner lives of the characters. At the same time, however, >> nature << is portrayed as a complex web of relationships that is beyond human control. Thus, waters shape the storyline and form a counter to the rigid demarcations that define pietistic thought. Focusing on the relationship between humans and the physical environment, I analyze the novel's narrative strategies and how it portrays this central struggle.
This article engages with discussion on literary imaginaries and Anthropocene scales, by examining the Norwegian narrative nonfiction text Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark in a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean, by Morten Str & oslash;ksnes. Focussing specifically on the oceanic setting of the text and the description of the Greenland shark, this article explores how the text employs allegory and humour to situate a sense of Anthropocene scales, and what the theme of conquest adds to an Anthropocene reading.
Based on a literary analysis of Marit Eikemo's reportage essay Alt s & oslash;kk i havet (>> Everything sinks into the Sea <<), the article shows how Norwegian sources might be valuable for international research on urbanized seascapes. The article demonstrates how a blue humanities approach sheds new light on Eikemo's acclaimed writings, focusing on her depictions of interactions between marine life, humans, and built environments at the first oil plant in the North Sea. It is claimed that Eikemo's application ofthe seal-motifpoints both forward and backwards in time as it communicates on different ontological levels; the seals are real beings of the present, seemingly heralding an era to come, but also echoing old legends and tales.
