Framtidens kulturvetenskap kommer kanske att vara intermedialitet, men då måste begreppet utvidgas och kompletteras ift dess nuvarande status och omfång.

Iconicity consists of mimetic relations between form and meaning. This article is based on the notion of ‘spatial thinking’ and it is argued that there is no form without meaning, and that all meaning has some sort of form. Two fundamental distinctions are used. The first is Charles Sanders Peirce’s well-known division into three types of iconicity: image, diagram, and metaphor, which is extended to include ‘weak’ and ‘strong diagrams’. The second is a distinction between ontologically different appearances of signs: visual material signs, auditory material signs, and complex cognitive signs. A two-dimensional model illustrating the relations between these two distinctions is presented. The model is based on the assumption that iconicity, to a certain extent, is gradable, and it shows that the field of iconicity includes many phenomena that are not generally seen as related, but that nevertheless can be systematically compared. It also shows, among other things, that the ‘metaphor’ and the ‘weak diagram’ are singled out by the capacity of miming across the borders both between the visual and the auditory, and between the material and the mental. The main argument of the article is that iconicity should be understood not only as “form miming meaning and form miming form”, but also as “meaning miming meaning and meaning miming form”.

This article analyses the relationship between women, food and power in two novels by the Swedish feminist writer Elin Wägner (1882-1949): The Norrtull Gang (Norrtullsligan 1908), and Penwoman (Pennskaftet 1910). One important point of departure is Diana McGee's Writing the Meal (2001), in which she examines how various representations of food reflect the feminist ideas of women writers of the period and their criticism of the traditional roles of women in society.

The analysis shows that Elin Wägner utilises the representation of food to examine and criticise the condition of women in contemporary Swedish society. The critical aspect dominates in the first novel, where food serves as a symbol for the harsh economic conditions, while the second sometimes parodies the role of the housewife and food in order to destabilise traditional gender norms.

This article aims to highlight how literary value is constructed today: how it is created and negotiated. It seeks to develop a perspective that considers the manifold and complex value-negotiation process. In accordance with Barbara Herrnstein Smith, the article argues that literary value is generated by a constant and continuous series of negotiations between production and sale: the institutions, groups of readers, and individuals who are part of the value-making process. A number of different values circulate among different stakeholders – trade, educational, aesthetic, personal, and so on – and the negotiations take place in accordance with the dictates of the respective needs, interests, and resources of these stakeholders. While Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s theories on literary value remain influential, they have rarely been tested empirically. The basic premise of the article is that the process of value creation has to be discussed from new perspectives based on empirical research. 

The article presents a case study of the Swedish author Sami Said’s literary debut – the critically acclaimed Väldigt sällan fin – and the negotiation process before and after its publication. The fact that Said was unknown at the time of his debut most likely foregrounded the visible negotiation of literary value in his case, but we believe that the process can be seen as an example of a continual and on-going practise in the literary sphere as a whole. The analysis shows that different agents claimed values and positions both in relation to the book and to each other. For example, marketing and publishing paratexts emphasised values of knowledge, institutionalised literary criticism valued the aesthetic qualities of the novel, while readers writing on the Internet took a more emotional and subjective position. The valuation also went back-and-forth between reading the novel as expressing a particular, non-Swedish experience with biographical overtones, and understanding it as manifesting universal existential values.

This article relates to the subject of the journal "Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 2010:3-4", which was ”Literature and didactics”. The article is a contribution in a debate about teaching literature according to the reader oriented respectively close reading approach. I describe two classroom situations where I took up examples of so called paradoxical narrative, that is works containing narrative devices which break the narrative norms in one way or another. The conclusion is that metafictional devices do not necessarily block the reading process. On the contrary, such devices can be used as tool for teaching about narrative technique.

En analys av jungianska symbolmönster i Lars Gustafssons roman Bröderna.

This is a study of the hand as a frequent motif in the poetry of Johannes Edfelt (1904–1997), one of the leading Swedish poets of his generation and a member of the Swedish Academy. The hand motif in Edfelt’s poetry sometimes tends to be a vital theme and can be interpreted as a symbol, though flexible and amibiguous. From a rhetorical point of view it is more often than not handled as a synecdoche, more specifically as a pars pro toto referring to fate, the whole of mankind, or life itself. From a hermeneutic point of view it can manifest itself as a magic hand; as such, its origin is not merely biblical, but obviously also deeply connected to primitive art and especially to ancient petroglyphs and cave paintings, which began to inspire modernist writers and artists all around Europe in the 1920’s. Edfelt was devoted to the hand motif over the course of more than seven decades, from his first collection of poetry in 1923, to his last in 1996.