"En fullkomlig man"

“The Complete Man”: Body and Society in Viktor Rydberg The article treats the place of the body in the cultural criticism of Viktor Rydberg, not only as a central theme but also as an image with the potential to figuratively describe societal and even cosmic relationships. Rydberg’s ideal of the symmetrical and athletic body is seen in the perspective of his dependence on German neo-humanism and the gymnastic movement. The ideal of bodily symmetry figures as an image of universal man who defies the division of labor, while the deformed body inversely figures as an image of the lack of wholeness in a stratified bourgeois society. This is further elucidated by an analysis of Rydberg’s view of Darwinism and his fear of degeneration. In the final section, special attention is given to Rydberg’s broodings on the “Future of the White Race”. In this text, the body is a figure of the collectivity (the body politic) and its diseases signify political and moral crisis, while the remedy for this state of affairs lies in recognizing the unity of the living, the dead and the unborn in the body of Christ.

Kropparnas poesi

The Bodies’ Poetry: Eva Runefelt, Eva Ström and Swedish Poetry in the Late 1970’s In the mid 1970’s a new type of poetry, associated with the body, emerged in Sweden. Especially young women writers appeared to take Swedish poetry in new aesthetic directions, exploring questions regarding experience and language. This article focuses on two prominent writers, Eva Runefelt and Eva Ström, and discusses how their different types of poetry can be said to be a bodies’ poetry, and how it was discussed in contemporary literary critique. It also reflects on why this strand of poetry has been granted such a peripheral place in literary history.

”Den här kroppen som lämnat mig i sticket”

”This body that has forsaken me.” Breast cancer, bodies, and recovery in Kristina Sandberg’s "En ensam plats" and Yvonne Hirdman’s "Behandlingen" This article studies autobiographical accounts of breast cancer, so called pathographies, analysing how the body and the illness are portrayed. The article has a special focus on the experiences of the lived body, relating it to the psychological concept resilience as well as to the sense of estrangement of the body in illness and the socially situated body. The focus of the study is two autobiographical Swedish accounts of breast cancer: Kristina Sandbergs’ En ensam plats (‘A lonely place’, 2021) and Yvonne Hirdman’s Behandlingen. 205 dagar i kräftrike (‘The treatment. 205 days in the kingdom of cancer’, 2019). The article is located in the field of medical humanities and the authors aim to bring out aspects relevant to both the literary understanding of pathographies and the medical understanding of individual experiences of illness.

Gravitation

Gravitation: Modes of Reading in the Anthropocene In this article, I suggest ‘gravitation’ as a new way of reading in and for the anthropocene, which is characterised by environmentally destructive ‘social acceleration’. This reading practice would imply two things: First, that representations of the natural environment take a primary position in relation to the characters in many genres, including those where nature so far has been read as a highly conventional construction. It also involves acknowledging that ultimately, characters are positioned by the physical environment in these genres, as characters, in one way or the other, can never exist unrelated to the environment that encompass and cut through them. These genres I suggest be called ‘gravitating genres’. Second, and in a similar fashion, I suggest the term ‘gravitating reading’ to denote reading of physical books, which in this context becomes a highly preferred medium. This term partly coincides with that of ‘deep reading’ suggested by Mangen, but in addition, it also recognizes the dependency of both the reader and the medium on the natural environment. Together, these two practices amount to, I suggest, nothing less than a mutually sustainable economy of reading.

Kroppen som en plåga. Kroppen som en välsignelse. Kroppen som ett gränsland

Body as Torment. Body as Blessing. Body as borderland: The Symbolism of the Body and Illness in the Works of Tito Colliander. In my article, I examine the mental and physical illness of the body in the writing of the Finnish-Swedish writer Tito Colliander. Based on Yuri Lotman’s semiosphere theory, I show the cross-border function of the body in the text. The body suffering from a mental disorder or a physical pain is a kind of a filtering membrane that controls, filters, and adapts the external into the internal. The body can be considered as a borderland between the external and the internal, right and left, life and death, the male and the female, the upper and the lower, the spiritual and the material, heaven and earth, one’s own – alien. Based on Colliander’s writing, I show how the depiction of the body and the body’s diseases contributes to the literary representation and understanding of the fundamental oppositions of the culture.

Beröring och begränsning

Touch and Restriction: On the Human-Animal Interface Climate crisis and mass extinction show the need to reshape our understanding of human culture in relation to non-human lifeforms. The article considers touch as a point where the border between humans and other species may be renegotiated. Three supplementary modes of human thought, which combine explanation, speculation, and imagination, are interrogated in terms of how they each deal with the tactility of cross-species interaction: philosophy, mythical representations in literature and art, and documentary film. Interface is used as a common concept for how bodies remain distinct from each other while also being able to connect with each other. First, I present how the interface is conceptualized in general by philosophers like Derrida, Nancy and Harman, and between humans and animals in particulars by thinkers like Wood and Michaux. Then, I relate the discussion to how two mythical motifs, focusing on instances of erotic touch across species lines, have been represented in literature and visual art: Leda and the swan, and Pasiphaë and the bull. Finally, I move on to two documentary films: Robinson Devor’s Zoo (2007) and Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Unser täglich Brot (2005). The idea of zoosexual intercourse is contrasted to the distanced violence of the industrial keeping of animals. I suggest how touch show the possibility of a cross-species communion otherwise negated by late-modern industrial capitalism.

Body text

Body text: Typography and the corporeality of literature In one of his fragments, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg explains that German books printed with roman type, instead of the then default gothic type, always give him a feeling that he needs to translate them – evidence, he says, of “the degree to which our concepts are dependent on these signs”. The article elaborates on this thought. It explores the relation between literature, text (abstract and material), and typography, and argues – by means of bibliographical theory, Goethe’s mother, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roman Ingarden, and a diagnostic comparison between hand writing and digital fonts – that the longstanding, idealistic view, within literary criticism and history, of texts’ ‘content’ as independent of books’ and texts’ materiality and form, obstructs scholars’ striving for understand-ing. Text is not only representation; it is also presentation. Text has form, and the form produces meaning.

David Vikgren versus Antti Keksi

David Vikgren Versus Antti Keksi: The Work of Orature in Phonemic poetry David Vikgren (1975–) has made a phonemic elaboration of an oral poem by Antti Keksi (1677). Both these poets are situated in Torne Valley in the very north of Sweden. This region was colonised for centuries. For example, the language Meänkieli was forbidden in schools. Nowadays, efforts are made to restore Meänkieli, so David Vikgren’s phonemic work with Keksi’s oral poem has political implications. However, this is also an interesting piece of language materialism, where Vikgren treats the Meänkieli text according to three principles, as antonym, as anagram, and as homophony. This article suggests a method for the signification process of homophony. The semantic meaning of words changes considerably when phonemes are allowed to dominate and reading finds its base in sound associations.

Groteska kroppar i folkhemmets sverige

Grotesque bodies in the Swedish folkhem: Improper aesthetic and rhetoric in the magazine PUSS 1968–1974 In an analysis of the Swedish satirical magazine PUSS (1968–1974) this article explores what is considered as improper rhetoric and aesthetic in the public sphere. It draws on theories of representation and the culture of carnival laughter and the grotesque as well as research on the Swedish folkhem and satire and democracies. I coin the concept demogrotesque-atic in order to capture how PUSS, by using comics, grotesque bodies and carnivalesque, improper rhetoric and aesthetics, makes visible fundamental challenges to democratic societies. I argue that the magazine’s representational practices highlight the function of what is often considered ‘filth’ in the public sphere and the central role the grotesque body plays in upholding – and breaking – boundaries of propriety. I interpret this as important democratic work, and demonstrate that while the satire in PUSS is situated in a specific time and place, it is also part of a longstanding literary and artistic tradition.