This paper presents and discusses a course development project within Literary Studies at the Centre for Language and Literature, Lund University. The project specifically concerned two internet based courses equivalent to two semesters of study (1–60p). These internet courses originally date back to as early as 1997 and were then and now heavily drawn on our campus course, but have all in all been relatively unchanged ever since. The course development project aims to update these courses based on research and experiences concerning internet based learning and teaching in general, as well as experiences connected to the specific problems and opportunities of internet based courses in Literary Studies as well as the Humanities at large.
Freedom of the printed word is a defining feature of the modern world. Yet censorship and the suppression of literature never cease, and remain topical issues even in the most liberal of democracies. Today just as in the past, advances in media technology are followed by new regulatory mechanisms. Similarly, any attempt to control cultural expression inevitably spurs fresh discussions about freedom of speech.
In Forbidden Literature scholars from a variety of disciplines address censorship’s past and present, whether in liberal democracies or totalitarian regimes. Through in-depth case studies they trace a historical continuum in which literature reveals its two-sided nature: it demands both regulation and protection. The contributors investigate the logic of literary repression, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and analyse why it is thought essential to control literature. Moreover, the authors determine how literary practices are shaped and transformed by regulation and censorship.
Academic co-ordinator is Ole Marius Hylland, Senior Researcher, Telemark Research Institute Norway
Fem litteraturvetare reder ut hur böcker får sitt värde på dagens komplexa bokmarknad, mellan bästsäljarnas lastpallar, läsecirklarnas gemenskaper och de litterära prisernas hierarkier. Här finns också en sakkunnig analys av bokmässan i Göteborg, som ger en bra bakgrund till de senaste årens intensiva debatt och till beskedet nyligen, att mässan säger nej till Nya Tider som utställare 2018.
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.
Review of
Carl Jonas Love Almqvist: Samlade verk. 17, Ordbok öfver svenska språket i dess närvarande skick, redigerad och kommenterad av Sven-Göran Malmgren.
Stockholm: Svenska Vitterhetssamfundet 2013, 562 s. Pris: 330 SEK.
I min forskning har jag granskat 1700-talets brevkultur som en litterär och kulturell praktik och som ett socialt formeringsinstrument. Brevgenren utgjorde ett språkligt, kulturellt och socialt gränssnitt som bl.a. möjliggjorde en omdefiniering av och ett experimenterande med kommunikationen mellan människor. 1700-talets brevkultur och vår tids sociala medier, i vid mening, har det gemensamt att vara medialt betingade kommunikationsförvandlingar som har tillskrivits stor betydelse för våra föreställningar om identitet, grupptillhörighet och samhälle. Jag kommer att ge exempel på hur man via modern medie- och medieetnografisk forskning kan belysa historiska och mediehistoriska frågeställningar.
This dissertation examines the correspondence of the 18th-century German authors Anna Louisa Karsch and Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim. The main emphasis of the present study is to demonstrate how readings of Karsch's and Gleim's correspondence shed light on epistolary culture. Particular attention is paid to the notion of epistolary culture as a relatively unrestrained ?experimental setting? for bourgeois social roles and models. The correspondence of Karsch and Gleim is seen as particularly relevant, because it displays and highlights a number of significant transitional phenomena concerning aesthetics, ethics and gender-roles in late 18th-century Germany. This involves, among other things, aspects of a pre-romantic aesthetics of expression, which is manifested in the ?natural style? of epistolary culture.
The first chapter contains an analysis of the letter as a specific mode of communication. This includes an examination of the oral legacy of the letter as well as of the classical idea that the letter, more than any other written form, expresses the writer's ?inner self?.
The second chapter focuses on role play as an integral part of epistolary culture. The role play is regarded as an instrument of socialisation, and Karsch's role persona ?Sappho? and this role's function in the correspondence with Gleim are analysed from this perspective.
The following chapter depicts the so-called ?crisis in the code of communication?, a theory developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and often used to describe the semantic difficulties in expressing deep interpersonal feelings around the middle of the 18th century. This frequently qouted and rephrased hypothesis is tested in relation to the expressions of love and friendship found in the letters. These expressions of love and friendship are studied against the backdrop of the so-called ?cult of friendship? of mid 18th-century Germany. The fourth chapter deals with the autobiographical letters of Anna Louisa Karsch. These letters are considered crucial to the contemporary 18th-century reception of Karsch, as the letters formed the basis for Johann Georg Sulzer's biographical introduction to Karsch's Auserlesene Gedichte. The autobiographical letters are scrutinized by means of several dichotomies, such as public/private and construction/authenticity. Special attention has been paid to how Karsch uses the concept of ?nature? as well as biblical modes of reading and of identification, and to how Karsch's use of these value-laden concepts converge towards the idea of a pre-romantic aesthetics of inspiration and genius.
I ett nyligt nummer av Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap (2008: 2) skisserar Thomas Götselius grunddragen för en ”litteraturhistorisk forskning utan litteraturhistoria”. Det handlar om ”en bokstavlig litteraturhistoria: en historia litterae – en historia om hur bokstaven eller skriften konstruerats och ordnats genom historien”. Ett sätt att närma sig denna fråga är att betrakta litteraturen genom lexikografin (verksamheten att utarbeta ordböcker) och den svenska och internationella moderna lexikografins utveckling och historia från 1700-talet och framåt. Lexikografin kom att utgöra en nod i det nätverk av institutionella instanser som växte fram för att bära upp o entligheten kring 1800. Walter J. Ong skriver att ingenting ”illustrerar mera slående hur skrivkonsten och boktryckarkonsten förändrar medvetandeformerna” och avser därmed lexikografins och ordböckernas expansionsperiod kring denna tid. Den amerikanske statsvetaren Benedict Anderson framhåller lexikografins betydelse för nationalprocesserna i Europa under 1800-talet. Samtidigt kan man konstatera att färdigställandet av ordböcker långt ifrån var (eller ens är) en ideologiskt neutral aktivitet. Tvärtom förefaller de avväganden som de tidiga lexikograferna fattade ha tydliga beröringspunkter med litteraturens och de litterära offentligheternas sfärer. Det jag kommer att beröra är litteraturens funktionsbestämning i det lexikografiska sammanhanget. De praktiska exempel som jag arbetar med gäller i första hand Svenska Akademiens ordbok. En av de, i det här sammanhanget, mest intressanta formuleringarna av Ordbokens uppdrag är att ”viktiga litteraturverk och kända litteraturställen prioriteras”.
This article focuses on the Swedish literary canon debate preceding the Swedish government elections in September 2006. The debate was instigated by an article written by liberal politician Cecilia Wikström, in which she suggested reinstating an official Swedish literary canon. Wikström’s article sparked an inflamed debate that took place in all major Swedish newspapers, stretching over a period of more than two months in the summer of 2006. Due to the article and the debate that followed, questions concerning culture and cultural politics were more prominently featured in the 2006 election campaign than in previous campaigns. In addition to analysing the different positions of the debate, this article also suggests that Wikströms’s article is an expression of an on-going process in Swedish politics towards a more openly instrumental view on (national) culture and cultural expressions.
The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I wish to discuss the origins of The Swedish Academy Dictionary against the backdrop of the social and cultural his- tory of lexicography in 18th and 19th century Europe. Second, to consider material aspects of lexicography – the dictionary as interface – in light of German media scientist Friedrich Kittler’s “media materialism”. Ultimately, both purposes intend to describe how letters and writing have been constructed and arranged throughout the course of history. In Kittler’s view, “the intimization of literature”, that took place during second half of the 18th century, brought about a fundamental change in the way language and text were perceived. However, parallel to this development an institutionalization and disciplining of language and literature took place. The rise of modern society, the nation state, print capitalism and modern science in 18th century Europe necessitated (and were furthered by) a disciplining of language and literature. This era was for these reasons a golden age for lexicographers and scholars whose work focused on the vernacular. In this article the rise of the alphabetically ordered dictionary and the corresponding downfall of the topical dictionary that occurred around 1700 is regarded as a technological threshold. This development is interesting not only within the field of history of lexicography, but arguably also, since information and thought are connected to the basic principles of mediality, this development has bearings on the epistemological revolution of the 18th century witnessed in, among other things, Enlightenment thought and literature.
The following paper will present the key outcome of the research anthology project Forbidden Literature – Case Studies on Censorship, slated for publication in 2019. Through a number of case studies dealing with censorship’s past and present, in liberal democracies as well as in totalitarian regimes, the project reveals an historical continuum in which literature constantly appears as a phenomenon in need of regulation. Short reports of two case studies will be presented, exploring decisive aspects of the relationship between literature and society, the social and aesthetic function of literature and their transformations.
The first case study deals with forms of literary analysis taking place in the courtroom, exemplified by an obscenity trial against a Swedish avant-garde comic magazine in 1989. The second study analyses cases in which Swedish city libraries have refused to acquire, or provide clients with, certain non-fiction works – highlighting an increasingly common conflict between public cultural policies and constitutional principles such as the freedom of speech.
Together, the two studies show how the historical mode of visibility of literary texts is formed and transformed along with our understanding of what literature is and what it is able to do.