Collaborative Authorship and Postmigration in Jonas Hassen Khemiri's Novel Montecore

Montecore stages its own making through the joint authorship of Kadir, a friend of Abbas’, and Jonas, a young writer and Abbas’ son. Their collaboration aims at a novel about Abbas, who migrated from Tunisia to Sweden, now a missing person. The interpretation of his life proves to be a conflicting ground for the co-authors because of their generational differences. Through this metafiction – a so far neglected dimension in the study of Montecore – Khemiri depicts a young author’s ambivalent feelings towards his father and his story. Abbas has vanished from the family, but his special gift to Jonas, through Kadir’s mediation, deals with a linguistic talent that defies the rules of Swedish, showing the power of language to invent, and to imagine a different and less oppressive order

Rasmus på luffen by Astrid Lindgren as a tale of adoption and a tale of creation

Astrid Lindgren’s novel Rasmus på luffen (Rasmus and the Vagabond), published in Sweden in 1956, deals with the boy Rasmus who escapes from an orphanage where he has spent his life, meets the tramp Oskar wandering in the Swedish countryside during the summer, and finally finds a home. I argue that it is a tale of adoption as well as of creation, as the action lasts seven days. The aspects are intertwined: one can count the days and nights, because the tale records when Rasmus falls asleep and wakes up, which is connected with the protagonist’s fundamental fear of being abandoned, and the joyful awareness that he has not. Without pushing the analogy with the Genesis too far, it is true that a new life and a new world are emerging for Rasmus, and for his father Oskar. Lindgren’s warm and heroic representation of the luffare, the tramp in traditional rural Sweden, draws on personal memories and literary models, though adapted to the needs of children’s literature

In memoriam: Jørgen Stender Clausen

Necrologio del prof. Jørgen Stender Clausen dell'Università degli Studi di Pisa, colonna della Scandinavistica italiana dagli anni Settanta.Indicato qui, per necessità, come "recensione", il breve articolo è un necrologio che ricorda alla comunità internazionale degli scandinavisti il ruolo e la figura del prof. Jørgen Stender Claussen, collega con cui ho avuto l'onore di collaborare

Skandinaviska studier vid Italiens universitet. Med särskild hänsyn till Ca' Foscari i Venedig

Presentazione degli studi scandinavi a livello universitario in Italia e, in particolare, delle attività della scandinavistica all'Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia. Articolo scritto in svedese, su richiesta della rivista che è una delle maggiori per gli studi letterari in Scandinavia. L'articolo rientra in una serie nella quale si mappano gli studi scandinavi internazionali al di fuori del Nord al fine di favorire la conoscenza e gli scambi

Gunvor Hofmo. Un mondo senza Ruth

Primo saggio critico in italiano sull'opera poetica della scrittrice norvegese Gunvor Hofmo (1921-95) con traduzione di 25 poesie dal norvegese all'italiano con testo a fronte. Il trauma della guerra, l'occupazione nazista e la Shoah, con la perdita dell'amata Ruth Maier, ebrea, come fondamento della poesia di GH, del suo sguardo sul mondo e della sua interrogazione metafisica

Between Literature and Politics. Strindberg and Scandinavian Radicalism as Seen through his Relationship with Edvard Brandes, Branting and Bjørnson

Strindberg’s strategies of commitment, disengagement and new commitment across the border between literature and politics represent an intriguing intellectual adventure we can follow throughout his life as a writer. My article focuses on Strindberg’s dilemma as it took form in the first half of the 1880s, and observes it through his fundamental and controversial relationship with the Swedish journalist, literary critic and Social-democratic political leader Hjalmar Branting, with the Danish playwright, literary critic, journalist and radical liberal politician Edvard Brandes, and with the Norwegian writer, politically engaged intellectual and nasjonalskald Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. For a period they all experienced, along with Strindberg, the ambivalence of working in a social field where art and politics were intertwined, and were to a certain extent involved in the same project, each with his own interpretation. For Strindberg the writer, defending his autonomy from the political field in the end became crucial. What did his colleagues expect from his work? How did Strindberg react to their expectations? What is his legacy today with respect to stances such as intellectual autonomy from power, democratic rule, pacifism and critique of civilization, but also anti-feminism and anti-Semitism? Strindberg’s unruly genius illustrates that it is at times difficult to draw the dividing line between radicalism and reaction, and that the great modernists were often also great anti-modernists

Humorn i stadens mångstämmiga rum. En läsning av romanen Markurells i Wadköping av Hjalmar Bergman

Drawing on philosophical reflections about humour, laugh and smile (mainly Simon Critchley and Mikhail Bakhtin), on narratology (again Bakhtin and Leo Spitzer), and on the vast scholarship dedicated to the writer Hjalmar Bergman, one of the great classics of modern Swedish literature, the article proposes a new reading of the novel Markurells i Wadköping (The Markurells of Wadköping). In particular, it examines the way in which the narrator's voice conveys the small-town 'choir' of voices and opinions, producing tragicomic effects. Furthermore, the article reflects upon the possibility, or not, of translating humour to other languages, bearing in mind that Markurells i Wadköping is Bergman's only novel translated in Italian