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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Now showing 1 - 20 of 97

A New Niche in Children’s Literature. Norm-Crit Picture Books in Sweden
(LIR. journal, 2017) Hermansson, Kristina; Nordenstam, Anna
The publishing of norm-critical children’s literature is a relatively new literary phenomena in Sweden. This article aims to map the new literary niche in relation to ideological and cultural contexts. The main questions are: how are emancipatory ambitions manifested? Where do these ambitions leave the addressee? What norms are being (re-)presented, challenged and/or consolidated, and by what means? The analysis shows a shift in the output of publishing houses away from more explicitly norm-critical books that convey a pronounced pedagogy of tolerance in their presentation of same sex couples or alternative ways of doing gender, towards a less explicit questioning of norms and less family-oriented approach. Hence, there is an ongoing reorientation away from an initial emphasis on individualistic aspects and free will towards motifs like poverty, migration and death.
A Quantum of Solace and Heap of Doubt
(LIR. journal, 2015) Reinhold Bråkenhielm, Carl
The article examines two lines of reasoning for consolation on the basis of a religious belief about life after death. The first line departs from the presumed consoling power of such a belief (summarized in the »factory-girl« argument of John Henry Newman). According to Richard Dawkins and John Stuart Mill, this pragmatic line of reasoning is wholly irrelevant when it comes to the question whether it is rational or not to entertain such a belief. The second line of reasoning has to do with epistemic arguments for beliefs in a life after death. John Stuart Mill has certain arguments for the claim that it is rational to entertain such a belief. One of them is based on his specific form of theism. But is it possible to believe that the theistic Creator desires our good? I argue that it is possible even in the face of horrendous evil providing that a certain comprehensive fundamental pattern is chosen. I call this pattern »a theology of waiting«. God is revealed in the world but only in an unpredictable and ambiguous way. Such a theology of waiting is beyond the objective canons of science and logic. In sum, religious belief provides consolation conjoined with an ineradicable quantum of doubt.
A Song of Other Times. The Transformation of Ossian in Calzabigi’s and Morandi’s Comala (1774/1780)
(LIR. journal, 2019) Tessing Schneider, Magnus
The opera libretto Comala (1774) by Ranieri Calzabigi has traditionally been regarded as one of the poet’s lesser creations. It has sometimes been dismissed as being too closely based on Melchiorre Cesarotti’s influential Italian translation from 1763 of the eponymous dramatic poem, which James Macpherson included in his 1762 collection of the songs of Ossian, adapted or translated from Gaelic oral poems. In the present article, however, the author argues that Calzabigi’s Comala was not only an independent adaptation but also a highly original attempt to translate the peculiar poetic and cultural features of the Ossianic world – its savagery, sublimity, melancholy, and psychological obscurity – into theatrical terms. In this experimental musical drama, Calzabigi depicts the mysterious death of the overstrung heroine as the culmination of a process of withdrawing physically from the other characters and ultimately from the stage itself, as a metaphor for her gradual withdrawal from life and reality. The article ends with a discussion of Pietro Morandi’s setting of the libretto, performed in Senigallia in 1780, in which Calzabigi’s dramatic choices are translated into music. Adhering closely to the principles of Gluck’s and Calzabigi’s Viennese operas, Morandi’s Comala is the first example of a »reform opera« written specifically for Italy.
A Special Place in the Heart. Human-Animal Affection in Lena Furberg’s Stallgänget på Tuva
(LIR. journal, 2016) Nygren, Anna
This article examines emotions in girls’ relationships with horses as portrayed in Lena Furberg’s cartoon Stallgänget på Tuva (The Stable-Gang at Tuva). Published in the comic Min Häst (My Horse) between 1996 and 2008, the cartoon is an example of the literary genre of the horse book and a broader culture of (fictive and non-fictive) girl-horse-relations. Showcasing a series of sequences from the cartoon, the article suggests various ways to understand the human-animal bonds in relation to other kinds of relationships, to notions of what relationships are and can be and to extant social structures, such as sexism, racism, and capitalism. In the analyses theories from the fields of feminist theory, critical animal studies and practical knowledge are employed. Haraway’s notion of »companion species« is of particular importance. The article also discusses how the reader’s emotions could be interpreted and touches briefly on the subject of fiction and reality, and how the borders between these are reformulated in relation to the horse book reader.
Adelaide Ristori. Världsstjärnan som ideal eller avskräckande exempel
(LIR. journal, 2015) Heggestad, Eva
This article deals with the famous Italian actress Adelaide Ristori (1822–1906) who toured all over the world during the second half of the 19th Century. Her celebrated performances in Stockholm in 1879 and 1880 are witnessed in contemporary memories, diaries, and biographies, but also in fiction during the 1880s by autors like Emilie Lundberg Elin Améen, Frans Hedberg, and Josefina Wettergrund. While the more bio graphi cal articles discuss Ristori’s performances and greatness as an artist, her function in the fictional stories is more symbolic and she is regarded as either a threat or an enticement.
Alcina rediviva. Transformations of an Enchantress in Early Librettos
(LIR. journal, 2019) Hedman, Dag
The aim of this study is to follow the transformations in eighteen librettos of the enchantress Alcina from Ludovico Ariosto’s popular chivalric epic Orlando furioso (1516–1532). The librettos used were printed in Austria, France, Great Britain and Italy 1609–1782. The texts encompass different genres like ballets, drami/drammi per musica and feste teatrali. There are several reasons for the popularity of Alcina in the theatre of the Baroque Age, among which are her contrasting moods and the possibility of spectacular scenic effects due to the frequent occurrence of magic. The study shows that whereas there is an impressive variety in the librettists’ approach to Alcina’s personality and the plots in which she is involved, there is no clear development of the topic.
Att göra en läshandledning. Reflektionsvägar till litterär kompetens
(LIR. journal, 2017) Lore Andersson, Hanne
The purpose of this article is to examine how students, coming upper secondary school teachers in Swedish, deal with issues concerning literary competence. The students’ conception is reflected in a digitally published exam paper named »Teacher’s manual to short stories«. The manual consists of 12 minor manuals written by 23 students and were being produced during their fourth semester of literary studies. The students recommend teachers in upper secondary school to pay attention to literary reception as well as to the structure of texts. They also suggest that texts preferably could be read more than once and that interpretation should be supported by text examples.
Att vittna om sin tid. Framställningar av antisemitism och förföljdas erfarenheter i svensk 1940-talsprosa
(2015) Järvstad, Kristin
In this article three novels by Margareta Suber (Vänd ditt ansikte till mig, 1942), Marika Stiernstedt (Banketten, 1947) and Gurli Hertzman-Ericson (Hjälteglorian, 1950) are discussed as testimonies of their time, the politically and ideologically charged 1940s. The authors are portraying the lives of those most affected by war, also in a Swedish setting: Jewish refugees and the Jewish population in Sweden, all exposed to anti-Semitism. Suber, Stiernstedt and Hertzman-Ericson also picture experiences from the persecution of the German Nazis, the first representations of the Holocaust written in Swedish fiction. The article analyses the different modes of narration used in order to formulate these traumatic experiences, for example the pseudodocumentary text and the traumatic memory that is forever repeated. In this discussion research on Holocaust fiction is used, for example Ernst van Alphen (1997) and Susan R. Horowitz (1997).
Berättelser om brist. Bloggar om ofrivillig barnlöshet
(LIR. journal, 2015) Bernhardsson, Katarina
This article studies diary weblogs about involuntary childlessness, focusing on Swedish contemporary weblogs written by heterosexual women. The article suggests that the inability to procreate can be seen as an interruption in the western expectation of a predictable life course, and explores how the weblog authors deal with this interruption. The diary weblog is discussed as a genre and as a form of life writing and pathography, and different types of writing within the weblogs are discerned. The article discusses the blogging diarists’ construction of a new progression in the interruption, through their attempts to become pregnant, and how they deal with contemporary Nordic norms equating childbearing with things like happiness and life meaning, by striving to live up to the norms and at the same time questioning them.
Consolation and Empathy in the Religious Worldview of Tomas Tranströmer
(LIR. journal, 2015) Olofsson, Staffan
The poems of the Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer has an introspective quality which alternates intangible between things and events from the exterior world and events from man’s inner life. He constantly delves on what it means to be a human being in the world of today and regards insight into spiritual aspects of life as a survival strategy for man, on an individual as well as on a collective level, and something that brings true consolation. In the poetical world of Tranströmer humans are not only rational and social beings but also spiri tual and existential beings, and without the latter no authentic life exists. The emphasis in my presentation is on the performative force of Tranströmer’s poems for creating consolation and empathy, and the depiction of the religious worldview, conveyed by his poems. I have used the theory of the structuralist semiotician Michael Riffaterre as my main theoretical perspective complemented by the »I and it-relationship« and »I and yourelationship « outlined by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. I have concretized my study by interpretations of selected poems. The most innovative part of my presentation is a novel interpretation of the poem Romanesque Arches based on the presuppositions given above.
Consolation and Psychoanalysis
(LIR. journal, 2015) Johansson, Per Magnus
Psychoanalysis has seldom concerned itself with the notion of consolation at the theoretical level. Consolation (or comfort or solace) is not a psychoanalytic concept. Freud only uses the word once in his general reflections on the human condition. Freud saw religion as an effect of man’s infantile need for consolation, and compared it with obsessional neuroses. His reflections on the matter led Freud to the conclusion that religion is an illusion. The more people who gain access to thinking influenced by science, the more people will abandon their belief in the religious message. In Freud’s scientific-ideological attempt at turning psychoanalysis into a scientific discipline, phenomena which are parts of the religious and literary fields are lost. The human need for consolation is such a phenomenon. Donald W. Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object must be considered in this context. According to Winnicott, the transitional object is on the border between psychic, subjective reality, and external, objective reality. It is usually used by the child of the age of four to twelve months. The transitional object is a compensation which has the function of consoling the individual. In Sweden, as in many other European countries, the psychodynamic tradition that arose was to a greater extent concerned with fulfilling man’s need for consolation, as compared with pursuing an ideal that was influenced by the natural sciences. The psychotherapists in this tradition attended to man’s need for consolation, and the treatment was called pastoral cure.
Consolation as Graced Encounters with Ignatius of Loyola and Hélène Cixous
(LIR. journal, 2015) Reek, Jennifer
This article suggests that the sixteenth-century Basque saint Ignatius of Loyola and the French thinker Hélène Cixous experienced consolation in unexpected encounters with texts. For Ignatius, consolation came as a result of reading while recovering from a battle wound in 1521 the only texts available to him, of lives of the saints and Christ. For Cixous, it was the consoling birth of her writing life after the death of her father in 1948 and 30 years later a chance reading of the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. These encounters serve here as a point of departure into a beginning exploration of reading and writing as consolation in the work and life of these two disparate yet essentially compatible figures. Taking a cue from Cixous’s reading and writing practices, personal criticism is used in the reading of their texts so that the writing of this essay may itself perform an act of consoling.
Consolation in Christian Heinrich Postel’s Biblical Opera Libretto
(LIR. journal, 2015) Hedman, Dag
This essay discusses the prominence of the consolation theme in Christian Heinrich Postel’s biblical opera libretto Cain und Abel Oder Der verzweifelnde Bruder=Mörder (Hamburg, 1689). It is shown that in this drama the theme is relevant not only to the persons in the drama, but to the audience as well. This result stands in contrast to earlier research, which incorrectly has pointed out different other subjects as the main themes of the opera.
Consolation of Literature as Rhetorical Tradition: Issues and Examples
(LIR. journal, 2015) Agrell, Beata
This article investigates a tradition of consolation in order to explore rhetorical strategies and literary devices of consolatory texts. The aim is to elucidate how the view of consolation has varied through history and the impact of these variations on the motives for and the right to consolation. Issues dealt with are which sufferings that justified consolation, which kind of consolation that was accepted in an individual case, and which rhetorical means that were considered as appropriate. At first a theoretical and historical introduction will discuss the concept of consolation, its variants in tradition, and different states of mind considered in need of consolation. A special discussion concerns the condition of melancholy. Thereafter a few examples of consolatory rhetoric from various genres and historical periods will be analyzed, from Homer to Derrida.
Consolations of a New Earth
(LIR. journal, 2015) Cavallin, Clemens
In a marginalized group, personal suffering is inescapably united to excluding social and political structures and situations. To provide consolation to an individual then also involves showing a way of how the group can escape its painful predicament, which in early Christianity took the form of an end times confrontation between good and evil; and the emergence of new heavens and a new earth. In science fiction literature, a variant on this theme of cosmic regeneration is the escape to an earth-like planet with the help of an interstellar space ship. An interesting recent case of such an offer of consolation in outer space is the novel, Voyage to Alpha Centauri, by Michael O’Brien, a contemporary Canadian author. The story is a commentary on the marginalization of traditional, especially Catholic, Christianity, and the growing strength of a liberal secular order.
Contradiction and Radical Hope: Utopia as Method in the Lived Experience of Love
(LIR. journal, 2016) Vulliamy, Catherine
In this article, I explore the contradictions, tensions and hopefulness of love. Participants in my research shared accounts of love that acknowledged the anguish, loss and pain of love in uneven political worlds marked by patriarchal power structures and heteronormative assumption. At the same time as confronting the difficulty of negotiating love in this context, the accounts continued to express a determined sense of hope about love. I employ a dialectical approach in order to apprehend the paradoxes and tensions inherent to the lived experience of love. As I investigate the meanings and implications of both the contradictions of love, and the hope in love’s potential to transform, I use Ruth Levitas’ concept of utopia as method to show how the radical hope of love emerges directly from the contradictions of love as a means of imagining and creating new social worlds.
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.
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.
Diktens dynamiska sanning. Exemplet Agnes von Krusenstjerna
(LIR. journal, 2015) Williams, Anna
The article deals with the attention in recent biographical research on agency and strategy concerning the individual’s prospects to shape her public image in relation to existing opportunities and constraints. The approach invites new perspectives on biographical writing that focus on change and progression. The biography of the Swedish writer Agnes von Krusenstjerna serves as an example of how the theories can be applied. The article furthermore touches upon subjectivity in modern autobiographical literature, a subjectivity that reinforces the claims of conveying the truth, but also points toward an external reality of gender-related social structures.
Ditt språk ekar genom någon annan till mig. Röster i självbiografiska texter skrivna av kvinnor utan fast boende i Göteborg
(LIR. journal, 2015) Frövenholt, Amanda
This article discusses questions about voices and roles in the welfare system and in literature. Two magazines consisting of autobiographical texts written by visitors to »Huldas Hus« (Hulda’s House) in Gothenburg, a meeting place for women with unstable housing situations, are analysed. Based on my three roles as a social worker, as an editor of the aforementioned magazines, and as a student of Comparative Literature, I discuss the question of who is speaking. This is done by analysing the texts’ form and content, and also by analysing the paratexts of the magazines. The possibilities of literature to give voice without limiting the opportunity to speak are also discussed. The article concludes that there are some difficulties for the voices in the texts to speak freely. The texts illustrate the author’s experiences of not being able to speak: someone else with the power to define, for example the welfare system, always speaks first. It is also concluded that each mention of the social work context in the magazines, for example in the paratext, could create restrictions for the text’s ability to speak. But the paratext also seems to create space for the texts by calling for someone to listen.

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