Konstruktion och undersökelse, exotism och närhet i Per Olof Sundmans böker om Lofoten

The Swedish writer Per Olof Sundman (1922-1992) wrote mostly short stories and novels, but also reportages. The paper deals with two reportages from the Lofoten islands, Människor vid hav (1966, “People by the sea”) and Lofoten, sommar (1973, “Lofoten, summer”) The choice of the Lofoten islands as a subject is related to a fascination Sundman felt towards northern and arctic regions, a fascination he also expressed in a number of fictional narratives and in the documentary novel Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd (1967. English title: The Flight of the Eagle) A question that arises almost immediately is whether that fascination affects the way the reporter works and how it affects it. How does Sundman look at the Lofoten? What does he take notice of and tell us about? What kind of image does he give? And how does he understand his own role, his function as an investigator in an environment which is neither his own nor his postulated readers’ usual environment? Another question deals with the relationship between the reportages from the Lofoten and the author’s other works. Are the reportages easy to recognize as Sundmanian texts, can Sundman’s “signature” be traced in them? It appears that “People by the sea” and “Lofoten, summer” are not merely informative texts. They also to a rather high degree suggest an atmosphere, using among other things inherited representations and judgements to that purpose. Those reportages turn out to be strongly literary texts, in the traditional meaning of the word

Conquering the Arctic and Conquering the Sky: Views on Technical Progress and Superman in Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight and P. O. Sundman’s The Flight of the Eagle

Night Flight is a novel about a pilot, Fabien, getting caught in a storm at night while carrying mail from Patagonia to Buenos Aires. Losing his way, it becomes certain that he will perish, as the plane is running out of fuel.      Per Olof Sundman's The Flight of the Eagle is an historical novel about the Swedish engineer Andrée's attempt to reach the North Pole in a balloon in 1897. The balloon trip starts from Danes Island, one of the Spitsbergen islands, and flies for about three days, but it has to be given up by the men on the expedition at a point far away from the Pole. They try to make their way on the ice-pack back to Spitsbergen but die at the beginning of the winter

À la recherche de l’identité européenne : le « rapport » du Finlandais Jörn Donner sur l’Europe centrale en 1962

Le Finlandais Jörn Donner est écrivain, cinéaste et critique de cinéma. Il a écrit des romans, des nouvelles et des essais, mais aussi une série de livres de reportage, qui font de lui l’un des « écrivains-reporters » de langue suédoise les plus marquants de la seconde moitié du xxe siècle. Son « Rapport du Danube », paru en 1962, est une tentative pour briser les images toutes faites de l’Autriche, de la Hongrie et de la Tchécoslovaquie et pour montrer la persistance, malgré la division politique de l’Europe, d’une culture commune aux pays d’Europe centrale. L’entité culturelle constituée par l’Europe centrale représente, par métonymie, l’ensemble de l’Europe. Mais l’enquête sur le terrain fait peu à peu apparaître que la division des territoires de l’ancienne monarchie danubienne est plus profonde que ne l’avait supposé le reporter avant d’entreprendre son reportage.Der Finländer Jörn Donner ist Schriftsteller, Filmemacher und Filmkritiker. Er hat Romane, Erzählungen und Essays ge­schrie­ben, aber auch eine Reihe von Reportagebüchern, die ihn zu einem der be­deu­tend­sten schwe­disch­spra­chi­gen « Schriftstellerreporter » der zwei­ten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts ma­chen. Sein 1962 er­schie­ne­ner Rapport från Donau (« Bericht über die Donauländer ») ist ein Versuch, die gän­gi­gen Bilder Österreichs, Ungarns und der Tschechoslowakei zu durch­bre­chen und der Teilung Europas zum Trotz auf das Weiterbestehen einer ge­mein­sa­men mit­tel­eu­ro­pä­i­schen Kultur hin­zu­wei­sen, wobei die kul­tu­relle Einheit Mitteleuropas me­to­ny­misch ganz Europa ver­tritt. Im Laufe der Untersuchung er­weist sich je­doch die Teilung der Donauländer als tief­grei­fen­der als der Reporter es ein­gangs vor­aus­ge­setzt hat

Strindberg across Borders, edited by Massimo Ciaravolo

A world-famous playwright, but also a writer of genius in all literary genres, and, in addition, a man with an interest in painting, photography, languages, history, politics, natural sciences, religion and occultism, August Strindberg (1849-1912) sometimes reminds us of the universal Renaissance genius, though endowed with the anxious spirit of an artist in the age of modernity and advanced capitalism. Strindberg practised border crossing as a transgression against norms and a questioning of authorities; his position as a layman was perhaps uncomfortable but also a guarantee for the freedom and mobility he needed for artistic creativity and experimentation. Strindberg’s border crossing was, furthermore, a clearly developed transnational and multilingual agenda. Finally, his border crossing dealt with the historical condition of moving back and forth over the threshold between good old times and modernity. He was conscious of the contradictions involved, and torn between a constant avant-garde attitude, eager to connect with the most advanced artistic trends in Europe and conquer new grounds, and a nostalgic look backward, which explains, for example, his perception of a loss of natural space as well as his nostalgia for a lost patriarchal order. Thanks to this unruly fire and inexhaustible linguistic vitality, Strindberg became a seminal forerunner of modernism and twentieth-century art. Today his innovative work is more alive and challenging than ever. This volume gathers twenty-one contributions, written either in English or Swedish, by scholars from Sweden, Italy, Lithuania, France, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Russia, and the United States. The collected essays testify to the manifold aspects of border crossing in August Strindberg’s work, and the wide range of approaches to this aspect: world literature and the construction of Strindberg’s authorship (Vera Gancheva, Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams); translation studies (Elisabeth Tegelberg, Alexander Künzli and Gunnel Engwall); interaction with discourses focused on gender, politics and science (Tobias Dahlkvist, Massimo Ciaravolo, Cecilia Carlander); Strindberg’s anti-materialistic and anti-positivistic binary oppositions between outward and inward, lower and upper reality (Annie Bourguignon, Deimantė Dementavičiūtė-Stankuvienė, Polina Lisovskaya, Astrid Regnell); forms of intertextuality in Strindberg’s work, or deriving from it (Maria Cristina Lombardi, Andreas Wahlberg, Roland Lysell, Martin Hellström); theatre studies and stage productions (Franco Perrelli, Gytis Padegimas, Elvyra Markevičiūtė, Richard Bark); visual interpretations of Strindberg’s work such as sketches for a stage production and comics (Astrid von Rosen, David Gedin)

Peut-on lire Nordahl Grieg au XXIe siècle ?

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Compte rendu de : Margareta & Hans ÖSTMAN.— Au Champ d’Apollon. Ecrits d’expression française produits en Suède (1550-2006), Stockholm, kungliga vitterhets-, historie- och antikvitetsakademien, 2008. In Etudes Germaniques 2008, n° 4, p. 963

Compte rendu d'un ouvrage suédois présentant les textes littéraires écrits en Suède en langue française, du 16e siècle au début du 21e siècl

Literarische Gestaltung pazifistischer Einstellungen in Schweden nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg : Selma Lagerlöfs Das heilige Leben und Hjalmar Söderbergs ‘Die Schicksalsstunde’

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Le roman de journaliste

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Naivität und Hybridisierung der Sprachen in einigen Romanen von Erlend Loe

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Ester Blenda Nordström

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