Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion / Institutionen för litteratur, idéhistoria och religion

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A Sufi for a Secular Age: Reflecting on Muslim Modernity through the Life and Times of Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri
(2020-11-03) Eneborg, Yusuf Muslim
Fadhlalla Haeri (b. 1937) is a contemporary Muslim figure best known for his spiritual commentaries on the Qur’an and his influential role as a ‘post-madhhab’ and ‘post-tariqa’ Sufi teacher. Born and brought up in the pilgrim city of Karbala by its religious elite, Haeri would go on to pursue a secular education in the West and a successful career in the booming Arab oil industry. But Haeri would inevitably withdraw from the business world and return to his roots by directing his efforts towards teaching the Qur’an, resulting in numerous publications and a worldwide network of students, with past and present communities especially established in the United States, Pakistan, England, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and South Africa. The purpose of this thesis is to observe Haeri’s life and works through the larger historical story of secularity as told by philosopher Charles Taylor. As a Sufi sage in a secular age, what Haeri offers us is a mirror, reflecting a period of time in which we are still so immersed that it eludes our ability to understand it in any comprehensive way. By looking at how his life and works both reflect and respond to our current epoch, the intention is to offer a compelling narrative of what can broadly be called Muslim modernity, together with the themes of ‘authority’ and ‘authenticity’ that can be seen to define it.
"Äger du en skruvmejsel?” Litteraturstudiets roll i läromedel för gymnasiets yrkesinriktade program under Lpf 94 och Gy 2011
(2016-09-01) Lilja Waltå, Katrin
Ph.D. Dissertation at University of Gothenburg Title: “Are you the owner of a screwdriver?” Literature Study in Textbooks Produced for Swedish Vocational Training Programs under two Curricula Author: Katrin Lilja Waltå Language: Swedish with an English Summary Department: Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion Abstract This thesis investigates two task-based textbook series which are meant to be used together – Bra Svenska and Blickpunkt – produced for Swedish high schools and upper secondary schools (Gymnasiet) and tailored for students in the vocational training programs in Sweden. They were produced for two different curricula between 1994 and 2011. The dissertation focuses on the opportunities created for the reading and analysis of literature and the role the study of literature is given in the textbooks. This is done by using a in-depth analysis, exploring the pedagogy behind the texts and the choice of texts. Similarly, a content analysis which examines the texts themselves is applied. The overall purpose of the dissertation is to examine how expectations for reading literacy achievement and processing and analyzing literary texts are conveyed to students through the two textbook series. The dissertation also makes an attempt to interpret what opportunities for creating understanding the texts and related questions offer. The main theoretical premise is that a given textbook presumes a certain type of reader – this is supported by Eco’s theory that an author always writes with a specific reader in mind: a Model Reader.The following research questions are used in order to examine and analyze the materials: o What different types of approaches to literature, interpretation of the subject matter, and epistemology are being utilized in the textbooks? How do the texts suggest the construction of a certain Model Reader? o How were the textbooks revised and changed in connection with the new curriculum? The results of this survey indicate that there are differences in the textbooks concerning the demands made on students when it comes to literature study and the Swedish subject matter.The Model Reader who is postulated is assumed to be uninterested in literature and is motivated by instrumental needs. The textbooks examined can be said to reproduce the old idea about the small role of literature in vocational training programs. The textbooks’ tasks generally favor components’ parts and not the whole, i.e., an atomistic approach. The student is neither challenged to make independent observations and interpretations, nor challenged to meet something previously unknown to his or her sphere of life. The dimension of self-cultivation, education, and formation, or Bildung, is more or less absent in the textbooks and their materials. They propose a conflict between the instrumental and utilitarian demands and Bildung. Finally, the study concludes with a discussion about whether the forces acting outside of the national school system, such as market promoters and politicians, are given more and more space to influence what skills and knowledge the educational system communicates. Keywords: Model Reader, Eco, epistemology, view of literature, Swedish High School, textbook research, literature study, subject concept, Bildung, literature education
Åke Hodell. Art and Writing in the Neo-Avant-Garde
(2017-11-15) Gardfors, Johan
Åke Hodell and the Art of Illegibility provides the first in-depth discussion in English of the concrete poet and neo-avant-garde artist Åke Hodell’s works from the 1960s. Throughout the study, Hodell’s artistic practice is contextualized by way of comparison with examples from the earlier avant-gardes, as well as with contemporaneous writers and artists, indicating how the avant-garde and modernist legacies are preserved and transformed in the works of Hodell. The dissertation is a case study that unfolds against the background of the expanded field of the 1960s, for which a core issue is that of the relation between the different arts. Simultaneously as institutions such as Moderna Museet, Fylkingen and the electronic music studio EMS provided spaces for ‘open art’ in Stockholm, functioning as important catalysts for Hodell and his colleagues, the question of intermediality is manifest on the level of the work. Through analysis of Hodell’s early works, the present study demonstrates how a tendency towards dissolution of the different arts is paralleled by an emphasis on their respective materialities, and indicates the artistic practices of illegibility and linguistic reduction as a point where the ambiguous relation of the arts come to the fore. The study examines how Hodell’s artistic project is realized throughout various mediums and forms, and shows how his printed works open up a space between poetry and visual art, while they simultaneously highlight the medium of writing. Within this framework, the dissertation traces how writing becomes a means of representing subjectivity in several of Hodell’s early works. The study characterizes Åke Hodell’s artistic practice through its turn towards materiality, conceptuality and performativity. While this shift should be understood as a reaction against modernist ideals, the resulting procedures are ultimately connected to values of expression, subjective experience and conveyance of meaning in Hodell’s work, which hence is shown to rely on the fundamentals of the tradition it appears to overthrow. The present dissertation thus situates Hodell at a moment of transition, in which the radical turn towards the materialities of the artistic mediums co-exists with an idiom of subjective expression, and in which conceptual and performative procedures are paralleled by an ethico-political pathos. In sum, the present study provides an examination of the works by an artist who has been remarkably absent from the international discussion of the neo-avant-garde, while it also contributes with perspective on how we can understand the specificity of writing in relation to the permeability between the arts that characterized the neo-avant-garde.
Alma Natura, Ars Severa; Expanses and Limits of Craft in Henry David Thoreau
(2014-10-30) Otterberg, Henrik
The American naturalist, philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) lived and wrote in a time of vibrant change. During his short life his rural Concord, a small satellite town to Boston, Massachusetts, was rocked by religious and scientific debates, later by erupting passions over slavery and federal cohesion. Concord’s landscape was also transformed by railroad and telegraph technologies, promising economic revival after periods of crisis and stagnation, while radically altering the land and the prospects for those chosing to stay on it. Thoreau took part in many of the wider debates ensuing upon these developments, while remaining loyal to his home environs and to what these still offered him by way of natural surroundings. The present work focuses less on overtly political issues of his writings than on what may be called the egocentric and biocentric Thoreau – the man ruminating on epistemological questions regarding how nature, human as well as environmental, can be understood, and on ensuing aesthetic ones concerning how to portray and promote one’s findings. Inspired by the thematic criticism of the so-called Geneva school, involving the simultaneous embrace (confiance) and scrutiny (méfiance) of issues found pertinent to an authorial consciousness as this emanates from its oeuvre, it also makes use of more recent decon- structive and ecocritical perspectives focusing on the the anthropocentric limits and biocentric reach of linguistic representation, respectively. The running queries of the thesis – assumed to be integral to Thoreau and here spread over several, self-contained articles – can be summarized as follows: How to comprehend, evaluate and convey the natural realm as a self-contained ideal, but also with due attention to its increasing hybridity as transformed by human technologies? Will outward nature taken as a whole present an immanent or transcendent order? Which rhetorical tools to wield in portraying it, and what faith to put in their fidelity to the task of translating its truth, whether empirical or spiritual? Or, for that matter, to what degree may one trust human language to the challenge of conveying the elusive interiorities of the writing self (i.e. human nature)? Thoreau’s at once idealistic and empirical outlook was grounded in his ambitious readings in natural history, in his latent Transcendentalist leanings, and above all in his faithful walking and close observation of his local landscape, host as this was to a wealth of denizens and seasonally shifting features. This much appears already – as explicated here, and in contrast to the proposals of earlier research – from the variably immanent and transcendent approaches to a peaceful natural environment on display in Thoreau’s early essay “A Winter Walk.” Yet as Concord was transformed by new technology and infrastructure, Thoreau had increasingly to contend with a landscape hybridized by human culture – a troubling insight ultimately bearing also on how the expanses and limits of his own craft were to be conceived. In a social context where pow- erful disourses of modernity were asserting themselves via technical nomenclatures and contemporary propaganda (saliently “Manifest Destiny” and the “Commercial Spirit:” both reified in the railroad’s threatening Iron Horse in the “Sounds” chapter of Walden), what kind of language could Thoreau seek to muster, defiantly and redemptively appropriate to a vision of a more naturalized (self-)culture such as he sought to ground and formulate in Walden and elsewhere? Thoreau’s narrator in Walden arguably tries everything available to him rhetorically, but in his eventual failure to overcome the momentum of transforming technology seeks not only deflection to this reading, but also sweeping re-naturalizations and a return to direct experience. Thoreau’s devastating insight, as thematized subtextu- ally to my view, is that language itself consitutes an intrusive technology, laying its tracks and gradings and causeways in both spoken and written form – and that it is thus laden with the burdens and soilings inherent to the history of human handling of nature. The thesis further discusses how Thoreau could hope to attain an authority of voice sufficient enough to be recognized as a legitimate critic of conventional life and progess in Walden, and proposes a de- liberate rhetorical strategy of obscurity as complementing Thoreau’s reputed perspicuity. The disseration then turns to address a query regarding Thoreau’s vast accumulation of Journal entries on local natural phenomena during the 1850’s and early 1860’s, an activity the records of which have often prompted the question of how Thoreau would eventually have chosen to present these materials. While the answer must remain a speculation, an analogy to Tho- reau’s extant attitudes toward (cyclical) myth and (cumulative) human character is here explored, thus deviating from previous interpretations in seeing Thoreau’s journal-tending over the years not as as a species of antisocial activity in its disdain for figurative language, but as indicative of a long-term plan for a synthesized, archetypal calendar of Concord. Turning finally from the aggregate portrait of outward nature as gleaned from Thoreau’s Journal, the thesis considers the composite self-portrait of the author in Walden. What could his readers expect of his self-exposure in the book: a full-disclosure, redemptive narrative, or perhaps rather a prompting toward analogous, readerly self-scru- tiny? Here as elsewhere Thoreau explores the boundaries and extents of language and communication, revealing a metacritical mind acutely aware of its chosen tools.
American Dervish: Making Mevlevism in the United States of America
(2013-05-17) Sorgenfrei, Simon
In the late 1970s, the Turkish Mevlevi Sufi sheikh Süleyman Dede arrived from Konya, Turkey, in the United States. There he initiated a number of individuals primarily belonging to American esoteric groups as sheikhs in the Mevlevi order, known in Euro-America as the whirling dervishes. Some years later he sent his son the Postneshin Jelaluddin Loras to the United States, where he founded the Mevlevi Order of America (MOA) in 1981. The MOA has since then developed in a confluence between Ottoman-Turkish Islamic traditions and American esoteric currents and is today one voice in an ongoing transnational debate on how Mevlevi Sufism is to be understood and represented. The thesis is the result of fieldwork carried out among MOA circles in the United States and Europe in between 2008 and 2010 and focuses on the use of narratives, documents, garments and rituals in informant’s Mevlevi-making. Primarily, the study set out to examine how members of the MOA practice and authorize what they define as being Mevlevi Sufism in relation to (1) conceptualizations of tradition and authenticity, (2) questions regarding the legitimacy of leaders, (3) female participation and (4) members’ religious affiliations. A reoccurring theme throughout the study is simultaneity and inter-play between what is sometimes understood as incoherent or conflicting modes, such as continuity and change or alignment and autonomy. Such inter-play is analyzed as a fusion of what is presented as deferential and inferential approaches to tradition. Rather than an either-or attitude to such seemingly conflicting modes – where authoritative traditions are either made objects of submission or rejection – the approach of the individuals focused in the study is characterized by such simultaneity and inter-play.
Assembling the Historic Environment: Heritage in the Digital Making
(2022-03-02) Illsley, William R.
The historic environment is a formulation of the cultural past as experienced and documented in space. Traditional approaches to the historic environment tend to favour conservational and preservational paradigms, such as heritage stewardship or the dynamics of cultural resource management in relation to national policies. Alternatively, they often enquire into the entertainment and time travel approaches of contemporary museum and tourism sectors. Instead, this study will focus on digitality, as both an epistemology and as a means of transmission for assemblages and spaces in the historic environment. This approach is framed around a comparative study between UK and Swedish approaches to virtual heritage, including immersive technologies and XR (extended reality environments), and the digitised approaches to site and monument inventory, borne out the nineteenth century state-led interest in the preservation of cultural traditions within the public sphere. In doing so, I identify the recurring themes enrolled in processes surrounding digital creation and transmission of historic environment material. Often, this is manifested in the politics of representation and identity, as well as the dynamics of accessibility. Audience matters are crucial to both approaches, but in this thesis, I argue that broad understandings of usership are not fully understood and that the benefits of interdisciplinary humanistic approaches to the historic environment are not being sought. The argument being that simply making a tool or product accessible is not the same as making it egalitarian, nor easily useable or meaningful. It is found that the risk is often run of creating products whereby the audience is broadly the same in terms of culture or profession to that of the product creators. Many of the root issues, in particular those regarding diversity, are established in the current definitions of what the historic environment is as a physical entity embedded in the cultural landscape. These definitions are described within and expanded upon through proliferation of social and spatial theories to proffer a less tangible definition of the historic environment as a social space in its own right. By removing the physical boundaries of landscape, the goal is to re-establish a historic environment without the limitations of authorised vocabularies, narratives, or terms of authenticity, that shackle the historic environment to local or national government institutions. This in turn allows for a more socially defined, participatory, and holistic approach, returning the historic environment to a cultural realm defined by the lived experience of the contemporary public.
Att inventera ett folk. Populariseringar av vetenskaplig släktforskning i Sverige i början av 1900-talet
(2022) Eriksson, Britas Benjamin
This licentiate-thesis aims to describe and analyse the popularisation of what was called “scientific genealogy” in Sweden during the early 20th century. The study is constructed around two case-studies where I describe and analyse two different attempts to popularise “scientific genealogy” amongst Swedish amateur family-researchers, a knowledge-practise first formulated by the Historian Ottokar Lorenz in 1898. According to the proponents of these attempts, amateur family-resear-chers were not only expected to collect names, dates of birth and death and other traditional genealogical data but also other parameters, e.g. inherited diseases, physical and psychological traits, personality traits, and in some cases and if possible shape of skulls and predominant race-type; parameters that in the time-period was seen as being of scientific interest. I examine if these attempts can be understood as following the same mode of knowledge-production as the field networks described by Jeremy Vetter. This mode of knowledge-production involved amateurs as information-gatherers to acquire larger sets of data than earlier possible. I conclude that it is fruitful to understand the attempts to popularise “scientific genealogy” to laymen as a part of broader trends in historical changes of knowledge-production. Furthermore, the tendency to try to include laymen in broader surveys also made it possible to use the attempts to include laymen in the knowledge-production, as a tool to legitimize political ideas and ideologies – including but not exclusive to visions of eugenics and racial hygiene.
Att lära sig se. En didaktisk figur hos Sven Delblanc
(Söderströms, Atlantis, 2005) Agrell, Beata; University of Gothenburg. Department of Comparative Literature
Att skriva gränserfarenheter. En studie i Åsa Nelvins och Eva Runefelts författarskap
(2021-08-19) Bojö, Anna-Klara
Abstract The late 1970’s through the early 1980’s was an exciting and eventful period in Swedish literary history. Not only did the controversial and highly debated political women’s lit- erature emerge during this time, but also, simultaneously, new expressive forms began to take shape. In particular, young women writers appeared to take Swedish literature and poetry into new aesthetic directions, exploring questions regarding experience and language. This thesis centres on the study of the writings of Åsa Nelvin (1951–1981) and Eva Runefelt (b. 1953). The two writers, who were also friends, were regarded as two of Swedish literature’s most interesting names in prose and poetry respectively during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Yet, due to literary history’s tendency to create a sharp divide between a political yet aesthetically naïve 1970’s and a theoretically stringent but less political 1980’s, they tend to appear as somewhat peripheral figures. This study intends to demonstrate that Nelvin and Runefelt transcend the presumptive strong divide between the two literary decades. Inspired by post critical perspectives, mainly the assertion that literature can be philosophically interesting, this thesis highlights a set of linguistic problems articulated through Nelvin’s and Runefelt’s works concerning what Michel Foucault has termed limit experience. The study explores how Nelvin in her two most significant works of literature, the novel Tillflyktens hus, eller en f.d. inneboendes erinran (1975) and her only and post- humously published work of poetry Gattet: sånger från barnasinnet (1981) brings to the fore the experience of madness, and how she attempts various literary strategies to give that limit experience shape and form. Runefelt’s writing is more diverse, at least in regard to themes. In her earlier works of poetry, En kommande tid av livet (1975), Åldriga och barnsliga trakter (1978), Augusti (1981), and Längs ett oavslutat ögonblick (1986), Runefelt constantly reaches for the limits of language. Whether in a poem about the juncture between dream and wakefulness, or a more defining limit experience such as the moment between life and death, Runefelt stretches her phenomenologically informed poetic language beyond the point of reason to create logically impossible, yet poetically and affectively charged expressions. Runefelt’s later works, however, and especially her later works of poetry Mjuka mörkret (1997), I djuret (2001), and I ett förskingrat nu (2007) are centred around one dominant theme, death. Beginning with a series of texts written in memory of Nelvin, whose premature death occurred in 1981, Runefelt’s later writing takes a turn towards mourning and the dead. The study highlights how Runefelt’s later poetry, with one foot in elegiac myth and the other in a form of phenomenological poetics, constantly contests the limits of death, and furthermore attempts to make the paradoxical experience of being dead accessible to the living through her writing.
Att sluta från början. Tidigmodern läsning och folkbokens receptionsestetik
(2011-05-09) Wingård, Rikard
The thesis poses the question, why were Volksbücher read and loved by some people in the early modern period and at the same time criticized by others. By doing so three important goals are aimed at : 1 ) to arrive at a better and more stable definition of the concept of the Volksbuch ; 2 ) to develop a better and more adequate reception theory for premodern and early modern culture, readers and literature, than has hitherto been concieved ; 3 ) to get a better understanding of Volksbücher as literary objects, of their mode of expression. B eginning with an analysis of the Swedish academic use of the concept of the Volksbuch from 1817 to present it is stated that non of the attempts to define the term have been very succesful. It is proposed that a more promising definition of the Volksbuch concept is as a concept of historical reception. T he reception history of the early modern Swedish Volksbücher is outlined, with comparisons to the Danish and German history. It is concluded that the history of the readership of the early modern Volksbuch in Sweden follows to a large extent that in neighbouring countries, and that the prevalence of lower class reading of Swedish Volksbücher during the 17th century should not be so easily dismissed as it has been by several scholars. B y introducing a theoretical superstructure based on David R. O Olson’s The World on Paper ( 1994 ) the analysis digs into the works of the humanist scholar Juan Luis Vives and his relatively detailed and influential critique of Volksbücher. Vives’ Christian normative understanding of reception and modern reception theory is identified as a version of what Wolfgang Iser has called the classical norm of interpretation. This norm represents one of two ways of reaching what is called an encompassment of meaning ( meningsomslutenhet ), in reading as well as in life. Associated with official Christianity, literacy and modern hermeneutics, it is a method of expansion. By stretching beyond the field of personal experience, time, and place it tries in dialog with the unfamiliar to fit the pieces together into a coherent and meaningful whole. We name this the expansive type of reading. Having observed that the expansive type of reading does not harmonize with the response-inviting structures of the Swedish Volksbuch edition of Seven Wise Masters (1642), but rather with the oral and archaic structures described by Olson and Mircea Eliade, there is reason to suppose a connection between an oral / archaic sense of experiencing and the reading of stories, similar to that which the expansive type of reading represents. This second way of experiencing is not built on expansion, but contraction. In order to establish encompassment of meaning in the beginning of and during life ( reading ) the individual assimilates new experience with those already possessed, making them instantly familiar. By not taking note of the difference between the said and the meant, and by the force of different means of apprehending the future and a limited consciousness of profane history, time is contracted and eradicated into an ever present moment. Hence, we call this the assimilative type of reading. It is found that 17th century Swedish Volksbücher, e. g. Helen of Constantinople, Apollonius of Tyre, Thil Eulenspiegel, and several others, in their contexts, intertexts, typographical layout, peritexts, narratives, and symbolism, are filled with dominant response-inviting structures which potentially support the assimilative type of reader. It is concluded that one reason for the antipathies raised against Volksbücher during the early modern period are due to these pronounced response-inviting structures, structures that did not match the literary preferences of the critics. In short, the expansive type of reader should have difficulties finding satisfaction in reading the Volkbücher under discussion. In addition, the thesis has shown that we could expect to find empirical variants of the assimilative type of reader during the early modern period, and that their (ideal) way of reading seems to be thoroughly compatible with the same response-inviting structures. This accounts, at least in some measure, for the relative popularity of the Volksbücher.
Beastly Lessons: Natural Utopias in Seventeenth-Century England
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2022-04-06) Kottum, Sandra Iren
The present study investigates the motif of virtuous animal instructors in three selected English texts from the second half of the seventeenth century: James Howell’s The Parly of Beasts (1660), Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), and Thomas Tryon’s The Way to Health (1683). These authors proposed solutions to the challenges facing early modern England, most notably the Civil War, the emerging empirical science, and the incipient colonization of the Americas. By contrast to those con-temporary thinkers who sought to reestablish lost dominion over the natural world, Howell, Cavendish and Tryon located their blueprints for human betterment in the animal kingdom. They thereby revived theriophily, the ancient notion that animals are superior to humans by virtue of their natural-ness. In this study I examine how in the selected works this idea takes on a distinct, context-specific form. I introduce the genre category natural utopia to capture the authors’ fusion of natural ideals with the utopian impulse that pervaded late seventeenth-century England. Through close readings that counter presentist interprettations, I examine the animals in the texts in light of the era’s shift from an emblematic to an empiricist perspective on nature, highlighting four themes: animal exemplarity, politics, malleability, and animal language. Throughout, I show how Howell’s, Cavendish’s and Tryon’s animal characters introduce a metaperspective on the human/animal relationship, denouncing both general anthropocentric claims to human preeminence, as well as local cultural developments in their era. The selected texts, I argue, depart from established genres of beast literature like fables and bestiaries, and also from speculative literature from the same era. Ultimately, my study shows how these works, while varying greatly with respect to form, content and the authors’ political orientations, are united in a green, countercultural protest against the early modern period’s increasing objectification and destruction of the natural world. My study foregrounds aspects of the texts that have hitherto received little scholarly attention and thereby deepens our understanding of animals in the selected texts, as well as in the seventeenth century’s intellectual landscape.
Berätta, förklara och uppenbara. Om textens intentionalitet i Sven Delblancs Prästkappan
(University of Gothenburg, 1981) Agrell, Beata; University of Gothenburg. Department of Comparative Literature
Receptionsestetisk studie av Sven Delblancs roman Prästkappan (1963). Undersöker hur en i texten inskjuten berättelse speglar den omslutande textens och därmed förebildar en läsarposition.
Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati. The Context and Significance of a Modern Hindu Personalist
(2010-01-04T09:16:16Z) Ferdinando, Sardella
This study explores the life and work of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati (1874-1937), a Vaishnava guru of the school of Chaitanya (1486-1534), who, at a time that Hindu non-dualism was most prominent, managed to establish a pan-Indian movement for the modern revival of traditional personalist bhakti that today encompasses both Indian and non-Indian populations throughout the world. To most historians, the period between 1815 and 1914 is known as Britain’s Imperial Century, when the power of British cultural influence was at its height, most especially in Calcutta, India, the jewel of the British crown. Here the profound admixture of Western and Indic social structures, values and ideas gave rise to a new indigenous middle-class known as the bhadraloka: the class responsible for what has come to be known as the Bengali Renaissance, and for producing such transformative figures as Rammohun Roy and Swami Vivekananda, both of whom believed non-dualism to be the fundamental ex-pression of Indic thought. As a result of their efforts (especially those of Vivekananda), modern Hinduism gradually came to be identified with Vedantic non-dualism (advaita) in both India and the West—an outcome that has historically obscured personalist bhakti strands. To redress this imbalance, the thesis explores Bhaktisiddhanta’s background, motivation and thought, especially as it relates to his forging of a modern traditionalist institution for the successful revival of Chaitanya Vaishnava bhakti. That institution, originally known as the Gaudiya Math, has a number of contemporary global offshoots, the best known of which is the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. The missing piece has been the scholarly study of the little known individual whose vision and thought provided the original impetus for these more recent movements, and who during his lifetime established centres in both London and Berlin. Bhaktisiddhanta pursued a modern traditionalist approach within the context of the multiple trajectories of Hinduism. While remaining faithful to a traditional reading of religious texts, he was nonetheless able to adjust core principles so as to make them fitting for modern times. The results of this study carry implications for the understanding of modern Hinduism and its development from pre-colonial to post-modern forms, which occurred during a time of global modernisation.
Brukslitteratur, skönlitteratur och medkänslans estetik – betraktelse över läsarter
(Stockholm/ Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2007) Agrell, Beata; University of Gothenburg. Department of Comparative Literature
Receptionsteoretisk och responsestetisk ansats. Diskussion av den skönlitterära textens möjligheter att via olika retoriska grepp styra läsandet. Åskådningsexempel: Margareta Ekströms novell "Långt lidet" (i samlingen Överfallet, 1963).
Challenge the past / diversify the future - proceedings
(Critical Heritage Studies, University of Gothenburg, 2015-03-05) Westin, Jonathan; Foka, Anna; Chapman, Adam; Critical Heritage Studies; Centre for Digital Humanities; HUMlab, Umeå; Visual Arena Research; LinCS; Malmö Museer
Challenge the Past / Diversify the Future is a multidisciplinary conference for scholars and practitioners who study the implementation and potential of visual and multi-sensory representations to challenge and diversify our understanding of history and culture. This volume contains an overview of all the presentations.
Crucifixion in Antiquity: An Inquiry into the Background of the New Testament Terminology of Crucifixion
(2010-05-07T08:45:36Z) Samuelsson, Gunnar
This study investigates the philological aspects of how ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew/Aramaic texts, including the New Testament, depict the practice of punishment by crucifixion. A survey of the ancient text material shows that there has been a too narrow view of the “crucifixion” terminology. The various terms are not simply used in the sense of “crucify” and “cross,” if by “crucifixion” one means the punishment that Jesus was subjected to according to the main Christian traditions. The terminology is used much more diversely. Almost none of it can be elucidated beyond verbs referring vaguely to some form(s) of suspension, and nouns referring to tools used in such suspension. As a result, most of the crucifixion accounts that scholars cite in the ancient literature have to be rejected, leaving only a few. The New Testament is not spared from this terminological ambiguity. The accounts of the death of Jesus are strikingly sparse. Their chief contribution is usage of the unclear terminology in question. Over-interpretation, and probably even pure imagination, have afflicted nearly every wordbook and dictionary that deals with the terms related to crucifixion as well as scholarly depictions of what happened on Calvary. The immense knowledge of the punishment of crucifixion in general, and the execution of Jesus in particular, cannot be supported by the studied texts.
Culture and Health : A Wider Horizon
(Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, 2015) Sigurdson, Ola; Priebe, Gunilla; Sager, Morten; Bernhardsson, Katarina; Brodén, Daniel; Sigurdson, Ola; Centre for Culture and Health, University of Gothenburg
What is Culture and Health? Culture and Health: A Wider Horizon introduces this highly topical field of enquiry from a broad, multidisciplinary perspective. The book addresses fundamental issues including:What do the terms ‘culture’ and ‘health’ actually mean? How has the field emerged in Sweden? How can we research Culture and Health? Can we avoid an instrumentalisation of art – and should we? Culture and Health: A Wider Perspective also provides a detailed introduction to two central, international research directions: ‘arts and health’ and the ‘medical humanities’. As well, the book sketches the diversity of research perspectives in the field at the University of Gothenburg. Culture and Health: A Wider Perspective is at once an accessible and in-depth introduction to the field with many approaches. Directed at researchers, students, policymakers and practitioners, the book is an important resource for future study and practical work.
En dag i Dublin. Om James Joyces Ulysses
(Institutionen för litteratur, idéhistoria och religion, Göteborgs universitet, 2015-05-25) Jansson, Mats; van Reis, Mikael; Olinder, Britta; Lönnroth, Lars; Lundahl, Mikela; Ryan, Barry; Lindell, Ingrid; Sigurdsson, Ola; Linder, Jens; Larsson, Lisbeth; Holmqvist, Ingrid; Trotta, Joseph; Bladh, Elisabeth; Ekholm, Christer; Nilsson, Ingemar; Lützow-Holm, Ole; Andersson, Erik; Arping, Åsa; Jansson, Mats
James Joyces Ulysses (1922) är en modern klassiker som kommit att prägla 1900-talets litterära medvetande. Den dag som handlingen utspelas, den 16 juni 1904, har till och med fått en egen benämning, ”Bloomsday”, efter romanens ryktbare antihjälte Leopold Bloom. Den firas numer årligen. Men vad kan Ulysses säga oss i dag? Med anledning av den svenska nyöversättningen 2012 anordnades en heldag vid Humanistiska fakulteten, göteborgs universitet, där forskare och föreläsare från en rad olika håll diskuterade romanen i hela dess vidd: språk, översättning, berättarteknik, religion, historia, exil, (post)kolonialism, genus, sexualitet – och mat. Föreliggande volym presenterar föredragen i redigerad form.
"Den döde gör succé". Dödsrunan och Dan Andersson
(Stockholm : Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2008) Agrell, Beata; University of Gothenburg. Department of Comparative Literature
Undersöker dödsrunan som genre med dödsrunor över Dan Andersson som åskådningsexempel.
Detta är min kropp: Kristen tro, sexualitet och samlevnad
(2011-01-05) Enstedt, Daniel

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