LIR. journal

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LIR.journal is a peer-reviewed scholarly periodical focusing on the broader research fields of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion. The journal is published by the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg.

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Degrees of Publicity. Handwritten Newspapers in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
(LIR. journal, 2011) Droste, Heiko
My paper concerns the handwritten newspaper in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The genre appeared in late sixteenth century as part of a growing public news market, which from the early seventeenth century onwards expanded rapidly with the introduction of the printed newspapers. The latter in parts replaced the handwritten one. However, at about 1700 the handwritten newspaper is still there, fulfilling specific functions alongside its printed twin. The question must therefore be what these functions were and why costumers were willing to pay for a medium that was much more expensive, although subject to the governments’ censorship in the same way as printed newspapers. The paper argues for different degrees of publicity, which shaped the public news market as well as private news correspondences. In consequence, there were different news genres, tailor-made for a general public or more specific groups of recipients. This argument relies on contemporary tracts on the printed newspaper as well as Swedish and Northern German collections of handwritten newspapers.
Permeable Boundaries: Manuscript and Print in Concert in Early Modern Sweden
(LIR. journal, 2011) Nyström, Eva
This article intends to show how manuscript and printed texts continued to co-exist during the first centuries following the invention of the printing press. The two media depended on and nourished each other in various ways. The handwritten text usually precedes the print, but often the print also becomes a model for handwritten copies. Furthermore, there are texts – and books – which were never intended to be printed due to their personal character, or which could not be printed due to their particular or provocative contents. Variations within this concomitance of printed and handwritten material are discussed on the basis of a number of manuscript books from Skara Stifts- och Landsbibliotek. The examples include authors’ originals, miscellanies, study compendia, interfoliated and annotated prints, and books that display manuscript and printed text items bound together. The creation of apographs by Swedish war prisoners during their Siberian captivity is referred to as a case where sheer necessity brought about manuscript book production in the early eighteenth century.
The Official Letter. Remarks on Style and Editing. Count Hernán Núñez’ Letters to the Spanish Dowager Queen, Mariana de Austria
(LIR. journal, 2011) Söhrman, Ingmar
Epistolary writing consists of contemporary testimonies of political and cultural events and linguistic usages and it is vital to have access to good editions. There are two main groups of epistolary writing: informal and official letters. This article focuses on the characteristics of an official letter from the late 17th century. There are three basic prerequisites for any kind of written communication: Purpose, Style and Distinctive character. The main purpose is to transmit a message that will be read by several people who might be unknown to the sender and the letter is often filed in archives. The style of an official letter is often very elaborate and even if the purpose and style are basic when analyzing texts every written message has its own distinctive character that could be seen as stylistic but not always so like in the case of diplomatic letters where some parts of the text can be codified. All these characteristics are dealt with in this article, which is based on letters that the Spanish ambassador to Sweden in 1671 wrote to the Dowager Queen of Spain.
"Painting Forth the Things That Hidden Are": Thomas Nashe’s ”The Choise of Valentines” and the Printing of Privacy
(LIR. journal, 2011) Sivefors, Per
This essay argues that the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe’s (1567–1601) erotic poem »The Choise of Valentines« explores early modern senses of distinction between manuscript writing and print. In his dedication and in subsequent responses to critique against the poem, Nashe invokes a sense of intimacy with his patron and his audience – an intimacy that is associated in his texts with manuscript writing but is enacted by references to, and directly in, the medium of print. In other words, »The Choise of Valentines« constructs a fiction of privacy that is rhetorically and commercially exploited in the medium of print – which is, in turn, constructed as the public opposite of the intimate, private medium of manuscript writing.
Editor's Introduction
(LIR. journal, 2011) Lindberg, Bo; Wingård, Rikard; Rosengren, Cecilia; Karlsson, Britt-Marie; Nauman, Sari
”The place is swarming with libels” – Manuscript Publication of Oppositional Texts During the Reign of Gustav III (1771–1792)
(LIR. journal, 2011) Mattsson, Annie
The article is based on some of the findings from the author’s doctoral thesis, Komediant och riksförrädare. Handskriftcirkulerade smädeskrifter mot Gustaf III (approx. Jester and traitor. Manuscript published libels against Gustav III), and concerns the manuscript publishing of oppositional libels during the reign of Gustav III (1771–1792). Some of the terms and definitions from Harold Love’s Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-century England (1993) are applied to the material in order to deepen our understanding of the clandestine system of diffusion of these texts. The dominant type of publishing was in this case »user publication«, where interested readers made their own copies and showed them to others. Particular interest is given to the role of the copier, who often combined functions of production, distribution and consumption in one person. The copiers are also the link in this system where we through manuscript collections can identify individual participants to a much larger extent than is the case when it comes to the anonymous authors and readers who never made any copies.
Paper, Pen and Print
(LIR. journal, 2011) McKitterick, David
How far is it possible to understand the penetration of books in any society, by using statistical methods? How far are the existing short-title catalogues helpful in this respect? More specifically, if we measure the output of printing and of printed books, are we likely to arrive at a useful conclusion about the circulation of knowledge and opinion? The continuing circulation of manuscripts long after the invention of printing, even down to the twentieth century, is a reminder of the importance of alternatives to print.
The Academic Lecture. A Genre In Between
(LIR. journal, 2011) Lindberg, Bo
This article provides some observations on the production and function of academic lecture notes in the early modern period at the universities of Uppsala and Lund int the 17th century. Books being relatively scarce, students aquired most of their knowledge by listening to lectures or by reading notes taken during the lectures. Compared to dissertations, i.e. the printed texts defended in a disputation, the lecture notes were usually better accounts of knowledge, but their contents may deviate substantially from what the lecturer originally said due to the modifications and distortions caused by those who took the notes or those who copied the them. Further, the mode of lecturing – dictation versus a freer extemporizing delivery – affected the form of the manuscripts as well. A pair of manuscripts from the teaching of Samuel Pufendorf in the early 1670s are here used to illustrate the difficulty to determine the authenticity of extant manuscripts and how they originated.
Introduction - On the analysis and critique of ideology
(LIR. journal, 2013) Falk, Hjalmar; Jansson, Anton; Pedersson, Anders
Zetterstéens oversettelse av Taha Husayn: al-Ayyam i et komparativt perspektiv. Strategiske valg i overføringsprosessen mellom kildetekst og måltekst
(LIR. journal, 2013) Mejdell, Gunvor
This study compares the translation manuscript Dagarna with four different book translations of al-Ayya¯m into English (1932), French (1947), Swedish (1956) and Norwegian (1973) respectively. The investigation focuses on how »cultural markers « are rendered in the target texts, for example through transcription or the use of footnotes. The overarching question concerns their relative positions on a scale from a more »domesticating « strategy to a »foreignizing« approach. The comparison shows that of all the translators K.V. Zetterstéen is the most source language oriented; his translation is the least »domesticated« in the corpus; it has more academic traits than the other ones, which vary in their degree of adaption to the implied audience of their place and time.
Ideological continuity and discursive changes in the Swedish educational system
(LIR. journal, 2013) Wedin, Tomas
In this article I present a reading of the relationship between discourse and ideology. With two curricula for the Swedish upper secondary school as my empirical basis, I suggest that the rather conspicuous differences between the curriculum of 1970 and that of 2011 ought to be considered as manifestations of discursive but not ideological changes. In the concluding remarks, I argue that the way in which the term discourse has come to be used has contributed to this. As a way forward, I contend that the Rawlsian framework, given the social-liberal values which it is supposed to reflect, provide us with political tools to map the most pertinent flaws in the curriculum of 2011.
Översättarröst och Översättarstrategi i Dagarna, ett översättningsmanuskript av K. V. Zetterstéen
(LIR. journal, 2013) Rooke, Tetz
K. V. Zettersteéns newly discovered translation from 1953 of Taha Husayn’s al-Ayya¯m (The Days) is the first translation from modern Arabic prose literature into Swedish as far as we know today. It was made to convince the Nobel Committee that the Egyptian author deserved the Nobel Prize for literature. The electronic publication of the manuscript offers new insights into the scholarly work of the great Orientalist. This article is a descriptive analysis of the translation as such. The aim is to uncover the voice of the translator in the text, establish his principles and evaluate the result from a literary point of view. As a literary translator Zetterstéen comes across as a literalist. He is faithful to the linguistic details of the source text and successfully transmits the content, but fails to communicate the humor and the finer elements of style. Dagarna is an adequate translation of the original, but has functional flaws. The manuscript highlights the need for a Swedish retranslation of the Arabic classic, but cannot fulfill this role itself.
The Ideology of consumption or, What does it mean to live in a tasteless world?
(LIR. journal, 2013) Benjamin Hansen, Brian
This article opts for a return to a critique of the ideology of consumption. Following Slavoj Žižek it argues that what must be addressed in present-day consumer-capitalism is the level of the superego. Superego is not about living up to certain norms/standards; rather, superego fits consumerism quite well, in that it is the injunction, even obligation, to go beyond any norms or standards and enhance enjoyment. The article attempts, through a diagnosis of postmodern ways of eating and consuming, a new metaphorization of consumer-capitalism as »tasteless«: We live, basically, in a tasteless world where desires and tastes must be reinvented continuously, and we are trapped in the tastelessness of this same world, caught in the matrix of consumption, whatever we do.
The Zetterstéen – Myhrman controversy
(LIR. journal, 2013) Eskhult, Mats
In 1908, the desire of docent David Myhrman to qualify himself for the professorship of Semitic languages at Lund University by editing a large Arabic work on ethics, resulted in a tense relation to his superior at Uppsala University, professor K.V. Zetterstéen, and in 1911 the conflict degenerated into a fierce and implacable fight that lasted to 1913. Myhrman had undergone a swift training in Semitic languages and Assyriology in the Unites States and Germany, a circumstance that made Zetterstéen conclude that not only Myhrman’s edition was marred by insufficient knowledge of Arabic, but that he also had taken short cuts at the expense of others, when working on Sumerian texts in Philadelphia. Finally, Zetterstéen got rid of his undesired – and in his opinion undeserved – assistant professor, but his own good name among his colleagues suffered considerably from the unpleasant affair.
Inledning
(LIR. journal, 2013) Larsson, Göran; Rooke, Tetz
Taha Husayns Dagarna som religionshistorisk källa
(LIR. journal, 2013) Larsson, Göran; Olsson, Susanne
The Egyptian author Taha Husayn’s autobiographical novel The Days has not been used as a source to the history of religions to any large extent. This article wishes to address if and how it can serve as a potential source to illuminate and analyze how religion is portrayed. Even though autobiographical texts are not pretending to present actual historical facts, but rather appear as reconstructions of a past, we address The Days as a text that says something about a specific historical situation, in particular concerning the religious landscape in Egypt at the turn of the century 1900. The Days illustrates the tensions and conflicts that prevailed in Egypt at the time, mainly considering religious interpretations and practices, between urban centers and countryside, but also among the traditional religious elites and the modernizers, attempting at reforming Islam. Taha Husayn was in favor of a humanistic and critical perspective in general, which made him align with a modernized and reformist version of Islam, which explains his critical comments on traditional pedagogy at al-Azhar and the Sufi traditions prevalent in the countryside.
Did somebody say political religion? Notes on an ideologeme
(LIR. journal, 2013) Falk, Hjalmar
This article deals with the concept of »political religion«, a term often used to connote certain features of totalitarianism. The aim here is twofold. First, to summarize certain features within this discourse for critical analysis, via an initial naming of it as an ideologeme, a concept developed by Fredric Jameson. Second, the article attempts to show how the ideologeme of the politico-religious narrative or discourse can and has been used in a critical-theoretical agenda by exemplifying its use in the early work of Slavoj Žižek. I argue that certain features of the ideologeme open up for hermeneutical critical work on political ideologies through a confrontation with the growing and many-faceted discourse on political theology.
Ideology as a Kantian logic of ideas
(LIR. journal, 2013) Jøker Bjerre, Henrik
One of the most original contemporary approaches to the critique of ideology is that offered by Slavoj Žižek, who has shown that ideology, far from being an exception to the »normal run of things«, is the precondition for social reality itself. Žižek’s approach to this question is based predominantly on psychoanalysis, in combination with various insights from German idealism. In this paper, I claim that it is possible to develop a strict logic of ideas by drawing more systematically on one of Žižek’s sources – Immanuel Kant. In Kant’s concept of the regulative idea, we find an approach very close to Žižek’s, alongside a purely philosophical argument for why ideas must govern our everyday apprehension of the world.
Objects of history / Objects of ideology
(LIR. journal, 2013) von Eggers Mariegaard, Nicolai
In this article I present some preliminary thoughts on what lessons might be learned from modern developments in critical thought if one wants to take up once again Michel Foucault’s project. I start out by discussing a few elements in Slavoj Žižek’s critique of ideology as well his critique of Foucault, and then go on to discuss Agamben and later Derrida, both in relation to Foucault, in order to articulate what I see as some of the most poignant elements of Foucault’s archeological method. Throughout the article I try to introduce to the archeological method what I call ‘split objects’. Even though I will not claim it is unproblematic to bring Žižek, Foucault, and Agamben together, I nevertheless see some affinities, and what I suggest is reading them in such a way that they can work as productive discussants of each other in order to revitalize an archeological critique of ideology.
Zetterstéens koranöversättning i idéhistoriskt perspektiv
(LIR. journal, 2013) Hjärpe, Jan
The Swedish Qur’an translation by K. V. Zetterstéen from 1917 is here viewed from a historical perspective. The development of the study of »Oriental languages« at the Swedish universities in the 19th century relates to the intellectual milieu of writers and publishers of that time. This period also meant a change of language, from Latin to Swedish for university publications. The translation by Zetterstéen had a special context as a part of the program for religious studies promoted by Nathan Söderblom. The premises in the society and in the intellectual circles at that time were different from the situation for the translation (or rather Qur’an paraphrase) by the diplomat Mohammed Knut Bernström from 1998. The one by Zetterstéen was made for an audience of students and intellectuals in a rather homogeneous Swedish milieu. The readers of the Bernström version include a young public of Swedish Muslims living in a society much more secular than the one in 1917.

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