Tunnelbanans poetik. Rum, plats och intertextualitet i Malte Perssons Underjorden

A Poetics of the Underground: Space, Place and Intertextuality in Malte Persson’s Underjorden (Tunnelbanans poetik. Rum, plats och intertextualitet i Malte Perssons Underjorden) The descent to the underworld in search of wisdom or to regain something or someone lost is a classic topos of literary history. In the context of urbanization and the technological transformation of society of the last two centuries, literary underworlds have often been re-imagined as actual and material subterranean spaces like subways, catacombs or sewers. In modernist poetry, for example, the descent to the underworld — rethought as an underground of modern transportation — has served as a spatial point of departure for reflections on poetics, on the poet’s conflictual relationship to the literary past and to his or her own society. Staged as a collection of sonnets on the Stockholm metro, Malte Persson’s Underjorden (2011) can be read as a contemporary take on this modern metamorphosis of the underworld. It can also be put forward as an example of a recurring tendency in the last few decades to link writing and literature to various urban and semi-public spaces of transit and transport, a tendency which poses significant challenges to Romantically infused ideas of literary creation as a place-bound, domestic, private and solitary activity. In this article, Persson’s Underjorden is discussed as an example of how a poetics of the underground is reflected and reconfigured in the Information Age. With perspectives from spatial theory and intertextual analysis, it is argued that two classic myths of poetic creation are contrasted and associated with underground space in Persson’s sonnet collection. Rather than opting for one of them, the self-reflective speaker of Underjorden remains playfully undecided on which side to take: is the contemporary poet a modern Orpheus or genius, creating original poetry, or an imitator, copyist and sampler, pouring from the boundless storehouse of literature

Mellan arkiv och fantasi : Syskonen Brontës tidiga världsskapande i Eva-Marie Liffners Blåst!

The early writings of the Brontë siblings have raised critical as well as creative interest in the last few decades. In countless manuscripts, the young Brontës collectively created and depicted the imaginary worlds of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, inspired by childhood role-play and extensive reading. The early world-building of the Brontës has recently been the subject of several fictional rewritings, often blurring the lines between the biographical Brontës and their imaginary worlds. Looking closer at one such rewriting — Eva-Marie Liffner’s novel Blåst! (2016) — this article discusses how it creatively reimagines selected characters, themes, and items from the early fictional worlds of the Brontës as well as the Brontë children themselves. Liffner’s novel is theorised as an instance of archontic literature, building on Abigail De Kosnik’s proposed term for various forms of appropriative writing that openly announce their sources of inspiration. Appropriation for De Kosnik is an archival operation; older texts are metaphorically conceived as archives or repositories of narratives, characters, and images from which new writers can extract what they need for their own reimaginings, and such new stories likewise expand archives and potentially change them. The article identifies and exemplifies three archival strategies used in Blåst!, reshaping in inventive ways the world-building and the imaginary worlds of the young Brontës: 1) a particular attention to the “empty spaces” of the Brontë archives; 2) a modification of details from the early writings and worlds of the Brontës to support the novel’s alternative version; 3) a rearrangement or “contamination” of elements from different archives through the inclusion of components from other fictional works by the Brontës but also from other writers and from biographical sources, resulting in a destabilisation of archival boundaries that other agents (e.g. critics and biographers) may want to sustain

Vid tänkandets gränser. Om Peter Nilsons essäistik

This study deals with the essays of Swedish author and former astronomer Peter Nilson (1937–1998). The main aim is to describe the characteristics of Nilson’s essay writing with perspectives from modern essay theory. This is done by relating him to one of the main paths of the international essay tradition, chiefly inspired by Michel de Montaigne, where the essay has served as a method or a creative tool for deep reflective thought. Some common features of the “reflective” essay are here discussed and illustrated through examples from Nilson’s essays. Above all, the reflective essay represents freedom from and opposition against scientific and systematic forms of thinking and writing. In Nilson’s writing, this search for freedom has resulted in myths, fantasies and speculation confronting a scientific ideal of reason and scepticism. Another typical feature of this type of essay is its personal orientation and its focus on the personality of the essayist (or rather the persona or public representation of him or her through the text). Nilson’s persona is ambiguous; on the one hand, it represents the trained scientist and learned astronomer, on the other hand, he is engaged in a complex role play with several fictive identities. Furthermore, an important aspect of the reflective essay is its tendency to portray the image of the essayist in the process of thinking. Nilson’s essays are strongly associative; they seem to be made up by the constant flow of the author’s thoughts, which is of course an effect accomplished by literary means. In sum, the essays of Peter Nilson are meditations and ponderings on the implications of science for everyday life, as well as accounts of the h­uman fascination for myths and legendary figures. His essayistic writing could be described as fragmentary, repetitive and simultaneous: in his essays, he tries to say everything at once. For the author, essayistic writing represents  a quest for truth and meaning taking place at the borders of thought, through the confrontation of opposing perspectives

Tunnelbanans poetik. Rum, plats och intertextualitet i Malte Perssons Underjorden

A Poetics of the Underground: Space, Place and Intertextuality in Malte Persson’s Underjorden (Tunnelbanans poetik. Rum, plats och intertextualitet i Malte Perssons Underjorden) The descent to the underworld in search of wisdom or to regain something or someone lost is a classic topos of literary history. In the context of urbanization and the technological transformation of society of the last two centuries, literary underworlds have often been re-imagined as actual and material subterranean spaces like subways, catacombs or sewers. In modernist poetry, for example, the descent to the underworld — rethought as an underground of modern transportation — has served as a spatial point of departure for reflections on poetics, on the poet’s conflictual relationship to the literary past and to his or her own society. Staged as a collection of sonnets on the Stockholm metro, Malte Persson’s Underjorden (2011) can be read as a contemporary take on this modern metamorphosis of the underworld. It can also be put forward as an example of a recurring tendency in the last few decades to link writing and literature to various urban and semi-public spaces of transit and transport, a tendency which poses significant challenges to Romantically infused ideas of literary creation as a place-bound, domestic, private and solitary activity. In this article, Persson’s Underjorden is discussed as an example of how a poetics of the underground is reflected and reconfigured in the Information Age. With perspectives from spatial theory and intertextual analysis, it is argued that two classic myths of poetic creation are contrasted and associated with underground space in Persson’s sonnet collection. Rather than opting for one of them, the self-reflective speaker of Underjorden remains playfully undecided on which side to take: is the contemporary poet a modern Orpheus or genius, creating original poetry, or an imitator, copyist and sampler, pouring from the boundless storehouse of literature

Rastplats för rastlösa : litteratur, skrivande och självreflektion i tre transitmiljöer

Vad förenar Jenny Diskis Främling på tåg, Malte Perssons Underjorden och Olga Tokarczuks Löparna? Alla är de exempel på litteratur från senare decennier som uppsöker rum för genomfarter och transporter, som tåget, tunnelbanan och flygplatsen, för att reflektera över sina egna förutsättningar. Det litterära skapandet har traditionellt förknippats med avskildhet och med det privata rummet, och i denna bok undersöks hur sådana föreställningar både utmanas och bekräftas när författandet söker nya färdvägar. Litteraturens transitmiljöer har många sidor: här kan främlingar bli förtroliga med varandra, men författaren kan också vända blicken inåt. Dessa rum kan ges laddning av klassiska myter eller användas för oppositionella estetiska experiment. De kan inspirera till nya sätt att organisera litterära texter och till tankar om skapandeprocesser. De kan utgöra fond för författares självframställningar och för reflektioner om litteraturens betydelse i samtiden. I Rastplats för rastlösa upprättas förbindelser mellan ett tjugotal litterära verk i olika genrer och från olika delar av världen som alla utforskar den kreativa potentialen i att vara i transit – på väg vidare

Essäisten som generalist : Författarroller och offentlig auktoritet hos tre samtida essäister

This is a study of the critical reception of essayistic works by contemporary Swedish writers Nina Burton, Peter Englund and Peter Nilson, who all represent a way of writing where the essayist acts as a generalist rather than a specialist. Despite having high academic degrees, these authors emphasize the personal ”light learning” perspective often used in the essay tradition. The primary aim is to investigate which roles and what type of authority that have been ascribed to these essayists depending on partly their educational background and partly on conventions regarding the essay as a genre

An Amateur's Raid in a World of Specialists? : The Swedish Essay in Contemporary Public Debate

The point of departure of this paper is a lecture by Edward Said, in which he claimed it necessary for today’s intellectuals to respond to modern specialization by assuming an attitude of amateurism in public life. It can be argued that there is a historical connection between the public role of the learned amateur and the essay as a form of expression and communication. Among recent advocates of the essay, the decline of this genre in modernity has sometimes been explained by the increasing public confidence in experts and specialists. According to this view, the development of modern society has made it less legitimate for essayists to serve as generalist commentators on society and culture. However, the growing tension between amateurism and professionalism goes back at least to the nineteenth century, and it has marked the ambiguous relation of the essay and the essayist to academia and institutional discourse ever since. This paper discusses what has become of this public role of essayists in late modernity. Some examples of essayists and essayistic writing of later decades, chiefly from Sweden, serve as illustrations of a general line of argument, even though there are also comparisons between the essay in Sweden and in other countries. Among the examples of Swedish essayists put forward here are Kerstin Ekman and Peter Nilson. The reception of these writers suggests that the essayist, adopting the role as amateur, driven by devotion and interest for the larger picture, might still be a vital part of public culture today. However, it is also clear that writers like Ekman and Nilson have gained at least part of their authority from being acknowledged in other fields or genres – Ekman as a distinguished novelist and Nilson as a trained astronomer

Subway Space and Transit Aesthetics in Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd

By examining the subway as a spatial structure informing the narrative and aesthetics of Faces in the Crowd (Los ingrávidos)—the debut novel of Valeria Luiselli—this article argues that transitional spaces such as the subway, designed primarily for movement and exchange, function in contemporary literature as reflective loci for aesthetic questions, and that they mediate an evolving debate on the changing conditions of artistic practice in a globalized world. In the novel, the subway, and the New York City subway in particular, is highlighted as a space for literary encounters and exchanges between Latin American and Northern American literary tradition. Furthermore, the material space of the subway and the practices of subway riding infuse the form and structure of the novel. With perspectives from Henri Lefebvre and critical literary geography as envisioned by literary critic Andrew Thacker, as well as from current discussion on aesthetic responses to globalization, it shows how the subway, with its double potential to function as an abstract, rational space of flows as well as a meaningful and situated location, mediates an aesthetic of movement and transit in Luiselli’s novel, interrogating some of the challenges facing literature in an increasingly global world.This research was funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).</p

Tunnelbanans poetik. Rum, plats och intertextualitet i Malte Perssons Underjorden

Emma Eldelin, Department of Culture and Communication, Linköping University A Poetics of the Underground: Space, Place and Intertextuality in Malte Persson’s Underjorden (Tunnelbanans poetik. Rum, plats och intertextualitet i Malte Perssons Underjorden) The descent to the underworld in search of wisdom or to regain something or someone lost is a classic topos of literary history. In the context of urbanization and the technological transformation of society of the last two centuries, literary underworlds have often been re-imagined as actual and material subterranean spaces like subways, catacombs or sewers. In modernist poetry, for example, the descent to the underworld — rethought as an underground of modern transportation — has served as a spatial point of departure for reflections on poetics, on the poet’s conflictual relationship to the literary past and to his or her own society. Staged as a collection of sonnets on the Stockholm metro, Malte Persson’s Underjorden (2011) can be read as a contemporary take on this modern metamorphosis of the underworld. It can also be put forward as an example of a recurring tendency in the last few decades to link writing and literature to various urban and semi-public spaces of transit and transport, a tendency which poses significant challenges to Romantically infused ideas of literary creation as a place-bound, domestic, private and solitary activity. In this article, Persson’s Underjorden is discussed as an example of how a poetics of the underground is reflected and reconfigured in the Information Age. With perspectives from spatial theory and intertextual analysis, it is argued that two classic myths of poetic creation are contrasted and associated with underground space in Persson’s sonnet collection. Rather than opting for one of them, the self-reflective speaker of Underjorden remains playfully undecided on which side to take: is the contemporary poet a modern Orpheus or genius, creating original poetry, or an imitator, copyist and sampler, pouring from the boundless storehouse of literature

Exploring the Myth of the Proper Writer: Jenny Diski, Montaigne and Coleridge

Encadré par deux citations de la tradition littéraire occidentale, cet article examine le dialogue changeant entre l’auteur britannique Jenny Diski et deux précurseurs littéraires désignés comme tels par elle : Samuel Taylor Coleridge et Michel de Montaigne. Dans On Trying to Keep Still (2006), un texte littéraire non-fictionnel, Diski s’engage dans un voyage de deux mois afin de vivre dans une maison de campagne isolée dans les Quantock Hills du Somerset. Son objectif est de jouer le rôle de l’écrivain solitaire et autoréflexif, et d’explorer les espaces, l’imaginaire et le comportement qui y sont normalement associés. En racontant son expérience, Diski répond à un mythe clé de la période romantique, l’idée de l’inspiration solitaire de la nature, déjà préfigurée dans la solitude de l’écrivain de la Renaissance dans sa célèbre tour. Le but de l’article est d’illustrer comment le dialogue sert d’intégration dans une tradition culturelle, et de montrer comment la réplique de Diski est décrite de plusieurs points de vue, de l’appropriation affectueuse au rejet et à la renégociation, en passant par la réduction ironique.Framed by two quotations from Western literary tradition, this article examines the changeable dialogue of British writer Jenny Diski with two of her self-appointed literary forerunners: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Michel de Montaigne. In On Trying to Keep Still (2006), a book of literary nonfiction, Diski sets out on a two-month journey to live in an isolated cottage in Quantock Hills, Somerset. Her aim is to enact the role of the solitary, self-reflective writer and to explore spaces, imagery and supposed behaviour attached to it. In relating her experience, Diski responds to a key myth of the Romantic period, the idea of solitary inspiration in nature, prefigured already in the solitude of the Renaissance writer in his famous tower. The purpose of the article is to illustrate how this dialogue serves by way of integration into a cultural tradition, and to show how Diski’s response is portrayed in various ways, from affectionate appropriation over ironic reduction to dismissal and renegotiation