No 5 (2015)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/80628

Att skriva liv

Att skriva liv. Fakta, fiktion, feminism är både en inventering och en vidareutveckling av ett spirande forskningsfält i skärningspunkten mellan en rad olika ämnen. Life writing är ett samlingsbegrepp, än så länge utan etablerad svensk översättning. Det inbegriper, men går utöver, biografi, och avser livsberättande och livsberättelser i olika genrer och medier. Frågan om exakt hur detta omfattande men till sin karaktär hybridartade fält ska avgränsas förefaller därför mindre relevant än frågor om exempelvis hur, var, och med vilka konsekvenser berättandet tar sig uttryck. Bidragen i detta nummer har en stor spännvidd, vad gäller material, metod och teoretiska infallsvinklar. De medverkande skribenterna kommer från en rad olika discipliner. Bredden har fungerat som en urvalsprincip för att visa på life writing som ett i alla avseenden heterogent forskningsområde. Bidragen visar även på fältets utveckling av teoretiska och metodologiska aspekter. Även om övervägande del av de medverkande har sin ämnestillhörighet i litteraturvetenskap, representeras här också forskare från teaterstudier, konst- och bildvetenskap, sociologi, socialt arbete och historia. I detta heterogena material kan ett flertal, överlappande potentiella kluster skönjas, såsom plats, politik eller performativitet. I så måtto speglar innehållet fältets bredd eller, om en så vill: dess produktiva suddighet. Varje försöka att systematisera materialet genom att pressa in det i avgränsande kategorier skulle därför reducera det. De möjliga kopplingarna mellan såväl ämne som metod eller teori är nämligen många och ofta överlappande, beroende på vad som fokuseras – såsom ämne, tidsepok, genre, metod eller teori. Därför lämnar vi åt läsaren att lyfta fram samband och skapa egna kluster.

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Now showing 1 - 16 of 16

Längtan efter södern. Om bilden av Italien i brevväxlingen mellan Ellen Key och Hilma Angered Strandberg
(LIR. journal, 2015) Åkerström, Ulla
Swedish feminist writer and educator Ellen Key (1849–1926) and writer Hilma Angered Strandberg (1855–1927) wrote letters to each other for 37 years (1888–1925). This article focuses on the image of Italy in their correspondence. Both Key and Angered Strandberg spent long periods there. Through their letters and their comments on the country, they also depict their lives and their relationship, establishing an implicit epistolary pact between them, where Key acts almost as a »confessor« and Strandberg as a suffering victim. Angered Strandberg, who wrote very long letters, was trapped by her everlasting financial problems and bad health, while Ellen Key, who was well known and better off financially, tried to help her friend in various ways. The image of Italy given by Angered Strandberg is very negative, while Key appears as a more traditional » Italia-romanticist«, following a long tradition formed by various Swedish and European travellers.
Vem är »Maja Lundgren« i Maja Lundgrens Myggor och tigrar? Fakta och fiktion som ontologi, framställningssätt eller retorisk kommunikationsakt
(2015) Wistrand, Sten
Maja Lundgren’s outspoken description in Myggor och tigrar (2007) of the male dominated cultural life of Sweden raised an animated debate in media. Well known authors and journalists felt themselves scandalized and accused Lundgren of being paranoid. Others claimed that the narrator and character »Maja Lundgren« was not to be confused with Maja Lundgren the author, because the book was fictional and not factual. In this article I discuss Myggor och tigrar out from different fiction theories and conclude that it seems most rewarding to approach the problem of fictionality as a question of rhetorical communication rather than ontology or stylistic devices. I also maintain that Lundgren’s book would implode if read as fiction, since the rhetorical strategy implies the identity of the author and the character.
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.
På liv och död. Om Kristian Gidlunds I kroppen min och autopatografins mediala former
(LIR. journal, 2015) Lenemark, Christian
Since the millennium the autobiography as a genre has received a tremendous boost. Especially noticeably has been the major impact of autobiographical stories of illness, so-called autopathographies. One important reason for this is the rapid development of new media, especially on the Internet, another the all increasing medicalization of society. One of the most talked about autopathographies in Sweden in the 2000’s is Kristian Gidlund’s I kroppen min [In my body], which was first published as a blog and then remediated into two books. The article examines Gidlund’s life-narrative about living with a fatal cancer disease from three perspectives. First, it approaches the question of why Gidlund’s story attrac ted so much media and cultural attention. Then the focus is directed at the illness narrative that finds expression in Gidlund’s blog and the two books: How do you tell about the traumatic experience of suffering from cancer? In what ways do the different media – blog versus book – matter in the design of the life story? Finally, the article discusses how Gidlund’s narrative gradually approaches the autobiographical genre termed autothanatography and how it thus goes from being life- writing to become death-writing.
När jag letade efter Göteborg. Bilden och arkivet i (re)konstruktionen av ett ursprung – en visuell autoetnografi
(LIR. journal, 2015) Kroon, Ann
I am presenting a work-in-progress in visual autoethnography, as it is currently unfolding, based on my experiences as a foster child in 1960s Sweden. My aim is dual-fold: I will describe the multi-faceted bricolage cultural analytic method that I am using in the project, and I will give examples of how one can tentatively interpret and analyse the visual materials. My methodological focus is the visualisation of the archive, where I survey the substantial archival material that directly concerns my own history, and I then choose textual excerpts and visual images to weave together and interpret. The visuals consist of historic images, my own photographs, family shots, postcards, and vernacular visuals. I use Roland Barthes’ punctum as a subjective tool, and I rely on reflexive writing and memory work in writing and in curating the archival material. I combine the visual and textual into visual synthesises for sociohistoric analysis and theorising, and I pay special attention to the gendered traces present in the building that was once my orphanage. This house served as a women’s prison for several centuries until the early 1900s, and in its archives one can catch material hints of the conditions for poor women in public places and the control of their sexuality in early and mid-1900s Sweden. I end the article briefly discussing the different ontological stance of the word and the image, making a call for letting the image take the lead in my investigation.
Virtuella identiteter och antibiografi i Tobias Bernstrups konstnärskap
(2015) Kjellmer, Viveka
Swedish multimedia artist Tobias Bernstrup (b. 1970) works in a transboundary universe where reality and fiction merge. I examine how computer games and virtual identities can be understood as artistic tools. I am especially interested in how Bernstrup’s use of his own body in his artworks relates to a biographical approach, and how he uses multiple media forms to portray identities. Discussing examples of Bernstrup’s art in relation to a biographical interpretation, I show that a traditional biographical perspective is misleading in his case and propose »anti-biography« as a concept better suited to understanding the biographical as non-personal. The artist’s body becomes a tool expressing generic anti-biography. The artist wears fictional biographies, all with traits borrowed from Bernstrup, but at the same time demonstrating that identity is created and negotiable. I conclude that Bernstrup’s exposure of his own body should be interpreted as referencing not his person but his artistic universe, with his body becoming a metalanguage to express something deeply human rather than personal.
Genuskrockar, klavertramp och fadäser. Anteckningar om konstruktionen av statsrådet Ulla Lindströms politiska persona
(LIR. journal, 2015) Karlsson, Gunnel
The political diaries of Ulla Lindström caused a great sensation when published in 1966, three years after her resignation as minister without portfolio. She was the only female minister in the Swedish government from 1954 to 1966 and, according to the press, her career had been characterized by faux pas or, as one reviewer of her diaries wrote: »(t)he silly Ulla /…/ of the botches, bodges, and gaffes«. He added that he himself had helped to put her down »with both malice and recklessness«. Surprised, he found her recently published political diaries impressing, written by an intelligent and humorous politician. He was, however, not the only journalist putting Ulla Lindström down. A particular discourse or way of describing her political persona was developed in the Swedish press during her ministerial career. She started as the good-looking »pin-up girl« of the Parliament and ended up as the »shrew« of the party, the faux pas queen who was too talkative and thus in need of a muzzle. She was constructed as deviant, both as a woman and as a politician. In her political diaries Ulla Lindström herself compared the way in which she and her male colleagues were portrayed in the press. She created her own political persona and tried to show that the political persona created by the press was a false persona, built on prejudices against women and misogyny. In my paper I will compare Lindström’s own political persona with the one created in the press.
Vittnet eller mottagaren? Att skapa traumaestetik istället för att lyssna
(LIR. journal, 2015) Kall, Christina
The aim of this article is to throw light upon normative features and ethical implications that follow when discussing the problem of ’testimony’ in essays from Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992) by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. My concluding point being that we, rather than focusing on the witness, need to start drawing more attention to the receiver/listener. Initially regarded as an impossible narrative in the writing of Felman and Laub, the Holocaust gradually transforms into a possible narrative, but to what cost? Here we are faced with two problems. In an attempt to save the narrative as a form of testimony by stressing its performative aspects, the representational qualities lose some of their urgency and consequently become secondary. When the failure of witnessing is inscribed as a condition of the ’authentic testimony’, and the witness is characterized by terminal crisis, she or he gets aestheticized as the unknown other. The risk here being that this inscription of the failure brings priority to testimonies showing their own shortcomings, and so, we have a modernist poetics of trauma excluding differing forms of traumatized testimonies.
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).
»Som en vildfogel i en bur«. Gestaltningen av kvinnlig erfarenhet i Anne Charlotte Lefflers Elfvan
(LIR. journal, 2015) Johansson Lindh, Birgitta
Anne Charlotte Leffler’s play Elfvan (The Elf) (1880) depicts a young woman’s first alienating experience of marriage. The motif of the young woman’s difficulties to fit the role as the governor’s wife in a small Swedish town is connected to the motif of her growing up, including her first sensation of sexual desire. The aim of the article is to illuminate how the embodied experience of a young bourgeois woman is created in the play. The main character’s emotions and bodily sensations are highlighted. The analysis also deals with narration of the young girl’s desire to expose her uniqueness for others to recognize. It furthermore sheds light on the depiction of the emancipating power of the young girl’s access to her biography, which contributes to the widening of her narrow social space as a young bourgeois wife. In so doing Iris Marion Young’s and Adriana Cavarero’s different angles to feminist phenomenology are combined.
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.
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.
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.
Det tidigmoderna jagets politik. Christine de Pizans Livre de la cité des dames och Louise Labés Œuvres som självbiografiska manifest
(LIR. journal, 2015) Amundsen Bergström, Matilda
The article investigates Sidonie Smith’s term autobiographical manifesto, in relation to late mideaval and early modern womens’ autobiographical writing and staging of lyrical selves. By relating Smith’s theory to la querelle des femmes generally and Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des dames and Louise Labés OEuvres specifically, I attempt to both show the usefulness of Smith’s theory when it comes to older materials, and to critically examine potential difficulties in bringing these two together. After a presentation of la querelle des femmes, Christine de Pizan and Louise Labé, the six aspects of the autobipgrahical manifesto and their respective uses and problems are discussed, taking as a starting point a reading of Livre de la cité des dames and OEuvres. The article concludes by arguing that the relative lack of studies focusing on early modern and medieval women’s autobiographical writing may be a result of difficulties arising when trying to aproach older material by way of postmodern theory of autobiogrpahy. The aim of this article is to give an example of how these difficulties might be ,if not overcome, made manageable.
Konstskapande med kroppen som biografi. Att navigera mellan det okända och det välkända
(LIR. journal, 2015) Adler Sandblad, Fia
In this article I seek to describe how to use performativity and acting skills in order to get in touch with and articulate once owns life-experiences beyond the explicit and well known. The question is how I, by physical and vocal practice, can approach fragments of my silent past and capture some of its emotional and existential meanings in order to share it with an audience. I highlight the necessity to articulate these silent experiences and make them part of a public discourse. I reason about my autobiographical position, what parts of reality I choose for the story and what fiction has to do with it.
Editorial - Introduktion
(LIR. journal, 2015) Hermansson, Kristina

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