Ungdomens poetiska form

The Poetic Form of Youth: The Rebellious Power of Language and Desire in the Anthologies Kärlek och uppror and Berör och förstör Siv Widerberg and Anna Artén’s poetry anthology Kärlek och uppror: 210 dikter för unga människor (Love and Rebellion: 210 Poems for Young People, 1989) is something of a classic when it comes to Swedish contemporary poetry explicitly addressing young readers. Thirty years after its publication another poetry anthology, Berör och förstör: Dikter för unga (Affect and Destroy: Poems for Youth, 2019), edited by Athena Farrokhzad and Kristofer Folkhammar, was published. Both books tap into a long tradition of lyrical anthologies. Neither of the anthologies contain poetry written primarily for young readers. On the contrary, the anthologies include poems from the Swedish lyrical canon. Although the two anthologies share a similar structure and joint themes such as youth, love, poetry, and rebellion, they are significantly different in regard to poetic form and the conceptualizations of youth. The main theoretical perspective in this study is that the form of the anthologized poems can be understood as ideological expressions of an interplay between the genre's tradition and its specific aesthetic context. By historizing the genre and comparing the different paratexts of the anthologies, the article shows that adult conceptions of youth hides behind the editorial choices. In a quest to (re)create new writing subjects, through the rebellious powers of poetic language and love, the symbolic form of youth poetry both challenges and negates adult notions of youth in the two anthologies.

Collaborative Authorship and Postmigration in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Novel Montecore

Montecore. En unik tiger (2006) stages its own making through the joint authorship of Kadir, a friend of Abbas’, and Jonas, a young writer and Abbas’ son. Their collaboration aims at a novel about Abbas, who migrated from Tunisia to Sweden, now a missing person. The interpretation of his life proves to be a conflicting ground for the co-authors because of their generational differences. This article proposes an analysis of Montecore building upon the notion of collaborative or multiple authorship (Stillinger 1991; Love 2002), and upon the discussion in Scandinavia and in Germany on contemporary migration and postmigration literature. Through a metafictional collaborative authorship – a so far neglected dimension in the study of Montecore – Jonas Hassen Khemiri depicts a young author’s ambivalent feelings towards his father and his story. Abbas has vanished from the family, but his special gift to Jonas, through Kadir’s mediation, deals with a linguistic talent that defies the rules of Swedish, showing the power of language to invent, and to imagine a different and less oppressive order.

The struggle between the power of language and the language of power

In this study we look at how pro- and anti-vaccination groups construct alternative knowledge and facts discursively and linguistically in order to challenge or support the established scientific knowledge on vaccines. Through this case study we wish to examine how the power of language interacts with a language of power when memes in creative ways mimic, produce and reproduce scientific language and practices. Drawing on a dialogical-semiotic and a discourse theoretical analytical strategy, we, first, adopt Austin’s speech act theory and Bakhtin’s concept of speech genres to argue that memes are performative with an especially illocutionary force and are made up of alien language from scientific discourses. Second, we argue that Laclau’s discursive approach to how political positions are articulated in an antagonistic terrain allows us to see vaccination memes as either subversive or supportive of a scientific social imaginary.