Nordic Literature: a Comparative History Steven P
Nordic Literature: A Comparative History Steven P. Sondrup and Mark B. Sandberg
VOLUME 1: SPATIAL NODES Volume editors: Dan Ringgaard and Thomas A. DuBois
During the course of the last year, work on the first volume of Nordic Literature: A Comparative History has made significant progress, most notably the completion of the first of three anticipated volumes. The finished manuscript, which runs 1792 pages (using the wider editing margins, double line spacing, and citations in both the original and English translations), has been submitted for review by outside readers along with this report. Based on previous publications by Benjamins in the CHLEL series, we estimate the printed size of this first volume to be just over 600 pages. Its basic outline remains same as described in recent years, although after discussion at the last CHLEL committee meeting in Siena, the title has been changed to that listed above. The first half (organized and introduced by Dan Ringgaard) is devoted to the identification of topographical constructs—“scapes”—that have been particularly important in Nordic literary imagination; the second half (organized and introduced by Thomas A. DuBois) shifts the analysis to emphasize the literary depiction of the way real places are used and transformed by human activity—“practices.” The underlying challenge of this first volume is to approach literary history in a way that acknowledges the importance of spatiality, thereby redressing the imbalance that results from the predominantly chronological approach that has obtained since the early nineteenth century.
The organization, taken from the final table of contents, is as follows:
General Introduction (Steven P. Sondrup and Mark B. Sandberg) Framework (Dan Ringgaard and Thomas A. DuBois) Scapes: Landscapes (Dan Ringgaard) Point of Contact: The Intricacies of Snæfellsjökull (Ástráður Eysteinsson) A Guide to Gurre, Temporary Landscape (Jan Rosiek) Utopias as Territories of Swedish Modernism (Sylvain Briens) Jutland and the West Coast as Liminal Spaces in Danish Literature (Wolfgang Behschnitt) “Far Higher Mountains”: Mountains in Danish and Norwegian Romantic Poetry (Louise Mønster) South of the South: Literary Capri (Arne Melberg) Scapes: Cityscapes (Dan Ringgaard) Through the Land of Lagom in Literature: Passing Small Towns in Middle Sweden (Anna Smedberg Bondesson) A City Awakens: Literary Helsinki at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Lieven Ameel) Walking the City: Female Pedestrians (Tone Selboe) The Limits of the Unlimited: Gunnar Björling’s Wordscape (Anders Olsson) The History Accumulator: Berlin as a Foreign Metropolis (Thomas Mohnike) Poets in New York (Anne-Marie Mai) Scapes: Lightscapes (Dan Ringgaard) Myth & Meaning of Foreign Lightscapes in Nordic Literatures 1: The Imaginary Elsewhere (Svend Erik Larsen) Myth & Meaning of Foreign Lightscapes in Nordic Literatures 2: The Geographic Elsewhere (Svend Erik Larsen) Qualities of Light: Interfacing Lightscapes in Eino Leino, Hella Wuolijoki, and Arvid Mörne (Pia Maria Ahlbäck) Glocalizing the Light of Norwg-West: From Inner Light to the Light of Labor (Per Thomas Andersen) Scapes: Millenniumscapes (Dan Ringgaard) Toxic Places: Chernobyl and a Sense of Place in Nordic Literature (Christopher Oscarson) This Site is Under Construction: Mediating the Øresund Region around the Millennium (C. Claire Thomson and Pei-Sze Chow) Cathartic Moments or Spatial Liberty: Variations of the Interplay between Fiction, Play, and Place in Computer Games (Bo Kampmann Walther) Practices of Place: Introduction (Thomas A. DuBois) Practices: Settling (Thomas A. DuBois) “And the Two Shall Become One Flesh”: Forging Familial Ties to the New Land in Nordic-American Immigrant Literature (Julie K. Allen) Taking Land and Claiming Place in Nordic Migrant Literature (Ingeborg Kongslien) Radical Utopianism among Nordic Immigrant Authors (Thomas A. DuBois) Practices: Dwelling (Thomas A. DuBois) Seasonal Secondary Dwellings (Ellen Rees) “Worker Ants on the Lush Bosom of Earth”: Cyclic Patterns of Life in the Finnish Countryside (Leena Kaunonen) By Land, by Sea, by Air, by Mind: Traversing Externally Internally via the Trope of the Bird in Finnish and Swedish Poetry (Kjerstin Moody) Practices: Exploring (Thomas A. DuBois) The Literary Arctic (Henning Howlid Wærp) Dislocation and Identity Formation in the Work of Isak Dinesen (Susan C. Brantly) Absorbing Places and the Triumph of Modernity: Hans Christian Andersen (Karin Sanders) Northern Bound: Exploring and Colonizing the Nordic Far North (Thomas A. DuBois) Practices: Sacralizing (Thomas A. DuBois) Niðaróss Cathedral (Steven P. Sondrup) Legend and Liminality (Timothy Tangherlini) Liminality: The Uncanny Bog (Karin Sanders) Nation and Sacrifice: Abraham and Isaac in Modern Scandinavian Literature (Elisabeth Oxfeldt) Worlding (Troy Storfjell) Fishing for Meaning on the Deatnu River: Sámi Salmon Harvesters, Tourist Anglers, and the Negotiation of Place (Tim Frandy) De-Framing the Indigenous Body: Ethnography, Landscape, and Cultural Belonging in the Art of Pia Arke (Kirsten Thisted) Works Cited (presented as a synthetic bibliography for the entire volume)
In the preparation of this manuscript for our first volume, two deviations from traditional practice should be mentioned:
1. Although prior volumes (with the exception of Marcel Cornis-Pope’s recent New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression) contain essentially no illustrations, 76 of the 1792 pages of the Nordic Literature volume include images that have been placed in the manuscript at locations suggested by the authors or editors. This approach seemed necessary for a volume devoted to a spatial approach to literary history. Nevertheless, we have avoided what might be called a purely encyclopedic approach to illustration and have made a concerted effort to be certain that each image enhances the meaning of the text conceptually (often through juxtaposition with other images) or informationally (especially in the use of maps and representations of topographical features and cultural artifacts that might not be familiar to readers from more southerly climes).
2. Typically translations into English have been provided in the text while the original is presented in a footnote. In Nordic Literature: A Comparative History (as authorized by a unanimous vote of the Coordinating Committees at its meeting in Lisbon June 6, 2011) primary source languages will appear followed by a translation of that quotation into English drawn from, when available, the published critical edition. The submitted manuscript for volume 1 in our series thus follows that practice.
As requested, we have also submitted a list of potential referees for the project, understanding that the final choice of readers is up to the CHLEL committee. Since the project has drawn on both the expertise of North American and European Scandinavianists and comparatists (and indeed depends for its perspective on the interplay academic perspectives inside and outside the region, we have represented both groups in our list of suggested readers.
VOLUME 2: TEMPORAL NODES Volume Editors: John Lindow and Timothy Tangherlini
Even though volume 2 of the project was not the main workflow priority this year, it has nevertheless made modest progress in its editorial work during the year (a BYU student has been working steadily on source checking for the essays in this volume on a weekly basis). We are aware, however, that a significant reboot effort is necessary, one that can reasonably be accomplished now that the first volume of the series has been submitted to readers and is not demanding so much of the general editors’ time. The volume on the temporal nodes of Nordic literary history had originally been planned as the first in the series, but since the two volume editors who initially organized the contributions (Lindow and Tangherlini) have been much less active in follow-through than anticipated, the publication of the other volumes has jumped ahead in order of finishing. We raised the possibility at last year’s CHLEL committee meeting that our volume 3 might appear ahead of our volume 2 and were assured that that procedure was not totally without precedent.
The essays in this volume on Temporal Nodes were drafted several years ago now, so it will be necessary to recontact contributors and give them the opportunity to revise and update their contributions as needed. We did something similar this last year with our volume 1 contributors, since there too a significant amount of time had passed in some cases since the date of original submission. Our experience with that process was that most contributors were more than willing to revisit their essays and make changes to reflect more recent scholarship when necessary, so we expect that will be the case here as well, although we have also learned that it is important to make individual contact with each individual rather than communicating en masse with the contributors. The more important experience from completing volume 1, however, was seeing more clearly how to bring the essays together conceptually in the different nodal sections through the preparation of the introductory materials. Since we (Sondrup and Sandberg) expect that much of that remaining work for volume 2 will fall to us, we have held off on starting the editorial process until we could be confident that we would have the time to follow through consistently. Now that volume 1 has been submitted (and since there will be some time before volume 3 is ready for the final copy-edit), this summer would be a good time to address the organizational issues in volume 2 that might require giving targeted authors some extra writing time. That way, they can be working on those things while we are waiting on the volume 3 manuscript to be passed along to us from those volume editors (Sanders and Rugg) and then also while we are working on that copyediting.
The table of contents for volume 2 is arranged slightly differently from that of our volume 1, since there are some essays that have been written jointly. The current table of contents is as follows (essays have been received in draft unless otherwise noted):
Volume 2: Temporal Nodes of Nordic Literary History Volume Editors: John Lindow and Timothy Tangherlini
Introduction: Modeling the Temporal Node (Steven P. Sondrup and Mark B. Sandberg) Temporal Nodes: The Advent of Writing: Introduction The Advent of Writing (Pernilla Hermann, Kate Heslop, and Jonas Wellendorf) The Long Prose Narrative: Introduction Long secular prose narratives in the vernacular Norse/Icelandic language (Gisli Sigur∂sson) The Visionary Protagonist: Introduction Birgitta of Vadstena (Thomas A. Dubois, Stephen A. Mitchell, and Tracey Sands) The Emergence of the Vernacular: Introduction Vernacular Bibles (Kaise Häkkinen, Malan Marnersdóttir, and Kirsten Thisted) Historical Consciousness in the 17th Century: Introduction The North (Mats Malm) Performance and Public Space: Introduction Bellman and Fredman’s Epistles (James Massengale) [One more essay needed here on the rise of vernacular theater in Denmark in the 1720s] The Autonomous Subject in Nature: Introduction Biocentricity in the 1790s (Anne-Marie Mai) [contribution from Steven Sondrup: not yet received] [contribution from Troy Storfjell on Sámi notions of nature and individual: still to solicit] Hegelianism: Introduction 1824 Hegelianism, Reconfigurations of Genres and Aesthetics in the Shaping of Institutions and Nation States (Pirjo Lyytikainen, Finn Hauberg Mortensen, Klaus Müller-Wille, and Jon Stewart) Modernity: Introduction Writing from the Margins (Stephanie von Schnurbein) Waking Up Slowly: Swedish Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century (Ulf Olsson) [Essay on Brandes’s idea of the modern breakthrough by Julie K. Allen; not yet received] Collecting Folk Narrative: Introduction Voice of the Folk (Timothy Tangherlini, Ulf Palmenfeldt, Ülo Valk, Malan Marnersdóttir and Thomas A. DuBois) Leaving the Doll House: Introduction A Woman at the Threshold of Modernity: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Nora’s Transgression Against Naturalism (Riika Rossi) [Essay on the lives of late-nineteenth century actresses by Julie Holledge; awaiting submission] [Essay on Swedish female playwrights of late nineteenth century by Lynn Wilkinson (awaiting submission)] [Essay by Mark Sandberg on the later cultural reverberation of Nora’s slam; awaiting submission] Fin de Siècle Decadence: Introduction Fin de Siècle Decadence and Cultural Pessimism (Stefan Iversen, Per Thomas Andersen, and Pirjo Lyytikainen) Cinematic Writing: Introduction Double Exposures: The Interplay between Scandinavian Photography, Cinema, and Literature around 1897 (Linda Rugg) From the Fairgrounds to the Salon: Cinema and the Rise of Mass Visual Culture in Nordic Literary History (Christopher Oscarson) Cinematic Writing after 1960 (Arne Lunde and Andrew Nestingen) National Identities in Crises: Introduction The Intellectual: Builder of a Nation? (Erik Svendsen) Finland’s National State and its Two Peoples (Lasse Koskela) From Oral Tradition to Rap in Greenland (Kirsten Thisted) [One more essay needed on idea of nation in Icelandic literature; not yet solicited] Design and Literary Culture: Introduction Functionalism, nature, and collectivism in Danish Modernism (Mark Mussari) Functionalism’s Reception in Finland at the Turn of the 1920s and 1930s (Erkki Sevänen) The Stockholm Exhibition: The Language of Facts in 1930s Sweden (Ursula Lindqvist) Technologies of Mobilization: Introduction Jazz and Literature (Claes Elholm Andersen) Between Literary Front Lines (Jyrki Nummi) Bureaucracy and Terror (Thomas Seiler) Literary Rebellion: Introduction Questioning Authority in the Swedish 1960s (Susan Brantly) Literary Rebellion/Modernism of the Sixties in Norway and Beyond (Monika Zagar) New Language, New Worlds (Tania Ørum) Alphabetic Perambulations: Experimental Poetry in the Swedish 1960s (Jesper Olsson) Neo-Theocentrism: Introduction Literature and the Market Rationality of the Global Era after 1989 (Andrew Nestingen, Stefan Kjerkegaard, and Jussi Ojajärvi) Works Cited
VOLUME 3: FIGURAL NODES Volume Editors: Linda Rugg and Karin Sanders
In last year’s report volume 3 was targeted for submission to readers by summer 2016. While the two volume editors and their team of student assistants have made progress, they will not meet that goal. Rugg and Sanders have finished their initial editing process (corresponding and negotiating changes with essay contributors plus initial copy editing) of all essays for the volume except for two that require some further attention. One promised article (Sandberg) will be submitted at the end of summer. The volume editors have continued working on the introductory essays (which constitute the bulk of the original writing left to complete) during this academic year. Some of these introductions are in draft form and others have been thoroughly researched, but few of them have been completed so far. This will take the concerted attention of both Rugg and Sanders in the summer of 2016, while they have already begun. They report that they now expect those essays to be completed at the end of the summer. (While the editors had hoped to finish this work earlier, both were asked to take on substantial administrative duties during the academic year, one as Associate Dean and the other as Department Chair.)
Once the individual section introductions have been completed by Rugg and Sanders, and once Sandberg has submitted his essay, it will remain for the general project editors (Sandberg and Sondrup) to write a concluding essay for the project reflecting on the contribution all three volumes have made to the rethinking of Nordic literary history. At that point the contributed materials for the volume will be complete. There is ample continued funding available for student labor at BYU that can be directed to finishing the source checking, along with work by Sandberg at Berkeley in the fall. Final copyediting and a return of the essays to authors for penultimate inspection and selection of illustrations will take place in the spring of 2017 with a submission target of May for the referee version of the manuscript.
The current Table of Contents for Volume 3: Figural Nodes is as follows:
Introduction (Linda Rugg and Karin Sanders) Figures of Affect: Introduction (Karin Sanders) Silence: Introduction (Karin Sanders) Revaluations of Silence: Configuring Reticent Protagonists in Old Norse and Related Texts (Jonas Wellendorf) En svensk tiger: Silence and Spoken Violence in Swedish Literature (Ulf Olsson) The Silence of Groups: Re-thinking ‘The Silent Finn’ (Petri Ruuska) Melancholy: Introduction (Karin Sanders) Norwegian Noir: Insanity and Imagination in Melancholy Literature (Kjersti Bale) Lyrical Melancholia in Swedish Literature (Anders Olsson) Angst and Shame: Introduction (Karin Sanders) Anxiety as Creative Force and Limit: Pär Lagerkvist, Birgitta Trotzig, and Lars Norén (Carin Franzén) Imaginary Edens – and Inner Hells: Anxiety and the Imaginary in Danish Literature (Jacob Bøggild) Faces of Shame in Danish and Norwegian Literature (Gorm Larsen) Figures of Need: Introduction (Linda Rugg) Intoxication: Introduction (Linda Rugg) Intoxication in Scandinavian Literature (Lars Lönnroth) The Itinerant Figure of Intoxication in Finnish Literature (Kati Launis) Graphomania: Intoxication with Writing (Jesper Olsson) Food and Famine: Introduction (Linda Rugg) Tantalizing Food: Figures of Fasting and Freedom (Mads Julius Elf ) Food and Famine in Norwegian Literature (Henning Wærp) Carnal and Fantastic Food in Finnish Literature (Siru Kainulainen) Religion and Secularism: Introduction (Linda Rugg) Reading, Writing, and Religion in Early Modern Scandinavia (Thomas Götselius) The Secularist Tone and Narrator in Nordic Literature (Thomas A. DuBois) Freethinkers and Figures of Faith in Nordic Literature of a Secular Age (Dean Krouk) Sexuality and Power: Introduction (Karin Sanders) Sex in Nordic Literature, 1870-2000 (Janet Garton) The Art of Forgetting: Breaking with the Past in Turn-of-the-Century Danish Literature (Anders Ehlers Dam) Transformations of the Strong Woman (Kukku Melka) The Figural Node of ‘Sex’ in Finnish Literature, 1960-2000 (Sanna Karkulehto) Creativity and Work: Introduction (Linda Rugg) Creativity and Work in Swedish Working-Class Literature (Anna Williams) Creativity and Work in Old Norse Poetry (John Lindow Work as a Socially and Politically Invested Figure in Finnish Literature (Jussi Ojajärvi) Figures of Attachment/Detachment: Introduction (Karin Sanders) Home/Interior: Introduction (Karin Sanders) Trouble at Hjarðarholt: The Figure of the Home/Interior in Old Norse Literature (Carl Olsen) Hygge and the Modern Breakthrough (Mark Sandberg—not yet submitted) The Coziness and Grimness of the Nordic Welfare Home (Anne-Marie Mai) Exile: Introduction (Linda Rugg) Exile in Finnish Literature (Jyrki Nummi) Exile in Faroese Literature (Malan Marnersdóttir) ‘No prophet is accepted in his own country’: Modernity and Exile in Nordic Literature (Susan Brantly) Suicide: Introduction (Linda Rugg) Suicide and the Sagas (Terry Gunnell) The Broken Heart of Modernity: Suicide in Modern Scandinavian Literature (Lisbeth Larsson) Solitude: Introduction (Karin Sanders) Scenes of Solitude (Dan Ringgaard) Solitude and Loneliness (Lisbeth Wærp) Embodied Figures: Introduction (Linda Rugg) The Autonomous Child: Introduction (Linda Rugg) The Autonomous Child in Scandinavian Children’s Literature (Kristin Ørjasæter) Innocents Abroad: The Autonomous Child in Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (Julie K. Allen) Dreaming Childhood, Dreaming Society, Dreaming Sweden: The Autonomous Child in the Welfare State (Karin Nykvist) The Stranger/Other: Introduction (Karin Sanders) Strangers and Other Others in Early Johannes V. Jensen (Jan Rosiek) Strangers Among Us (Olli Löytty) Forever Young: Rebellious Youth in Danish Rap – and Scandinavian Naturalism around 1880 (Jon Helt Haarder) [NOTE: this essay may still be cut] Conclusion to Nordic Literature: A Comparative History (Steven P. Sondrup and Mark B. Sandberg)