Scandinavian studies
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Item type: Item , Jonas Hassen Khemiri and the Swedish Novel: Autofiction, Intertextuality, and Postmigrant Melancholy(2026-02-05) Filipsson, Karin E; Stecher-Hansen, MarianneThis dissertation interrogates questions of belonging and identity in Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novels in relation to autofiction, intertextuality, and postmigrant melancholy. The dissertation situates the novels in postcolonial and cultural studies, and theories of affect and melancholia, and investigates how the representation of transcultural identities in contemporary postmigrant literature relates to the current discourse on Swedishness as whiteness. By using the term postmigrant literature, the dissertation shifts the discussion away from racialized categories of authorship to argue for the salience of other categories of analysis, such as genre, gender, and transnationalism. The dissertation offers an innovative approach to Khemiri’s authorship by arguing that his novels employ a multitude of narrative strategies, which convey a resistance to immigrant tropes and racialized readings. I argue that these strategies destabilize Khemiri’s position as a postmigrant writer and places his work in conversation with the Swedish literary canon.Item type: Item , The 1925 Norse-American Centennial: Embracing America, Performing Whiteness(2025-12-16) Moe, Erik Anders Glesne; Gunn, Olivia N2025 represents the 200-year commemoration of the first major wave of Norwegian migration to the United States. In 1925, the Norse-American Centennial celebrated Norwegian migration to America, while simultaneously enabling members of the Norwegian American community to perform their identity as white Americans. By analyzing three essays from the Centennial’s “Why We Celebrate” essay contest and President Calvin Coolidge’s keynote speech, I highlight three themes that most perform this whiteness: 1) the Vikings, Leifr Eiríksson, and the discovery of America; 2) claims of Norwegian American ethnic superiority compared to other white ethnic groups; 3) and the prevalence and celebration of Americanness, or what it means to be an American, within the Norwegian American community.Item type: Item , How Swedish Do I Sound? - A Qualitative Study of Language Attitudes in L2 SpeakersBrekkan, Greta Caroline; Doxtater, Amanda EMany features of a speaker’s language use can incite in a listener the formation of beliefs and attitudes about the speaker's language use as well as the speaker themself. When learning a second language (L2) these are often features, such as an accent, that are transferred from the speaker's first language (L1) and affect not only the individual’s language use but their attitudes toward L2 accents. This project investigates the attitudes that L2 speakers of Swedish carry with them about the Swedish language by conducting ethnographic interviews with L2 speakers. The interviews were done with adult L2 speakers of Swedish living in Sweden, and were conducted in Swedish. Participants were asked about their attitudes towards the Swedish language and what potential factors played into those attitudes. Using methods of Grounded Theory and ethnographic fieldwork, the interviews were carried out with the intention of letting the participants’ thoughts and beliefs carry the line of inquiry forward. Their answers provided insight into L2 attitudes about the perceived presence of a standard variety of Swedish and their varied experiences with foreign accent perception biases.Item type: Item , "The Immensity of the Conscious Experience of Age" Exploring the Representations of Age in Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Jon Fosse's Suzannah(2023-08-14) Amundson, Connie; Gunn, Olivia N.This dissertation explores multiple expressions of age as they are made available through close reading of two Norwegian plays, Peer Gynt and Suzannah, performance analysis of three productions of the plays (two of Peer Gynt and one of Suzannah), and a phenomenological study of volunteers associated with one of the productions of Peer Gynt. I conclude with an ethnodrama approach (a playscript) to report the findings of this study. The phrase "the immensity of the conscious experience of age" (Fuchs 2014) provides a framework for showing how these plays and their productions interrogate clichés about aging. Age theory has seldom been applied to Norwegian dramatic literature, but scholars of anglophonic drama argue that such attention can expand awareness of multiple narratives of aging on the part of theater professionals, scholars, and audience members. My hope is that this dissertation opens the door for additional age-theory-inflected scholarship of Norwegian drama, and that it encourages readers to create unique and diverse narratives about their own ages.Item type: Item , From AIDS to Assimilation: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Swedish Literature(2015-02-24) Warburton, Timothy Ryan; Gavel Adams, Ann-CharlotteThis dissertation examines representations of male homosexuality in Swedish literature from 1968-2013. Since the initial visibility of homosexuality with the coming-out of Bengt Martin on Swedish television in 1968, dominant gay rights discourses in Sweden have been characterized by internal dissent over the "proper" image of male homosexuality. Rather than tracing is origins to the Stonewall Inn Riots of 1969, this dissertation focuses on the AIDS crisis as a crucial and pivotal turning point in the history of homosexuality, and as playing an integral role in the shaping of contemporary discourses on male homosexuality. The project expands the history of homosexuality in Sweden beyond legislative milestones, and analyzes key sociopolitical moments in Swedish history in order to locate the literary representations into a broader context. This study is organized into four chapters that examine the literary representations of male homosexuality. The first two chapters of this study offer analyzes of the literary history as well as the political and legal discourses through which ideas about homosexuality were circulated. Chapter I discusses Bengt Martin's coming-out on Swedish television, and argues that Martin's trilogy about the young homosexual in Stockholm, Sodomsäpplet (1968), Nejlikmusslan (1969) and Finnas till (1970), first established literature as a space in which dominant ideas about homosexuality were contradicted. Prior to Martin's coming-out, the medical profession and legal discourses produced information about homosexuality unilaterally. Chapter II examines Ola Klingberg's Onans bok (1999) in the context of two pieces of legislation surrounding HIV/AIDS, inclusion of HIV under Smittskyddslagen (1985) and Bastuklubbslagen (1987). This chapter analyzes the legacy of these pieces of legislation in both Onans bok and the coming-out of Swedish pop star Andreas Lundstedt in 2008. The two latter chapters of this dissertation reflect the shift in the way homosexuality and gay identity have been discussed in a broader sense since the late 1980s, and thus employs a more theoretical framework in order to drive its discussion. Chapter III works with the idea of the cultural amnesia of the AIDS crisis, which was undertaken by dominant gay rights discourses in order to promote a bourgeois image of male homosexuality. This chapter looks at two subgenres of Swedish literature: the young adult novels Duktig pojke (1977) by Inger Edelfeldt and Spelar roll (1993) by Hans Olsson; the gay chick lit novels Jaktsäsongen (2006) and Bekantas bekanta (2007). The analysis focuses on the symptoms experienced by gay culture and identity as a result of the phenomenon of cultural amnesia. Chapter IV employs trauma theory to examine Jonas Gardell's trilogy Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar (2012-13) and focuses on the idea of the double trauma of the AIDS crisis. This chapter argues that Gardell's trilogy demanded a cultural recollection of the AIDS crisis, and engages scholar Sara Edenheim's critique of the media discourse that ensued. This dissertation considers the broader effects of the overall increase in acceptability and visibility of homosexuality, and concludes that literary representations of male homosexuality demonstrate a distinct departure from earlier representations that were informed by medical discourses and discourses of disease; the analysis presented in this study demonstrates how representations of male homosexuality published after the AIDS crisis unanimously support gay identity as a valid expression of an authentic self. The study also concludes that Jonas Gardell's trilogy marks a crucial shift in the role of representations of homosexuality in literature, as the trilogy is the first example of literary discourses of homosexuality informing dominant discourses on cultural memory and sexual identity.Item type: Item , Reading the Surface: The Danish Gothic of B.S. Ingemann, H.C. Andersen, Karen Blixen and Beyond(2014-02-24) Kastbjerg, Kirstine Marie; Stecher, MarianneDespite growing ubiquitous in both the popular and academic mind in recent years, the Gothic has, perhaps not surprisingly, yet to be examined within the notoriously realism-prone literary canon of Denmark. This dissertation fills that void by demonstrating an ongoing negotiation of Gothic conventions in select works by canonical Danish writers such as B.S. Ingemann, Hans Christian Andersen, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), as well as contemporary writers such as Peter Høeg and Leonora Christina Skov. This examination does not only broaden our understanding of these culturally significant writers and the discourses they write within and against, it also adds to our understanding of the Gothic - an infamously malleable and indefinable literary mode - by redirecting attention to a central feature of the Gothic that has not received much critical attention: the emphasis on excess, spectacle, clichéd conventions, histrionic performances, its hyperbolic rhetorical style, and hyper-visual theatricality. As genre markers of trivial entertainment, these characteristics are often dismissed, but to understand how the Gothic works one must take into account its foregrounding of surface mechanisms and its peculiar surface-depth perspective, which informs all levels of narration, setting and characterization. When meaning is not buried in the depths but is played out on the surface, an extremely unstable sense of personal identity is the result. This is the most important contribution of the Gothic counter-narrative to the representation of the human predicament and it clashes dramatically with the Danish discourse of self-formation, Dannelse (Bildung), which governs the national consciousness to the present day. By dressing up reality - and realism - in excess in disorienting narratives of fragmented subjects, Danish Gothic provides an important correlate to the construction of a harmonious Golden Age Romanticism and of Danish literature as wholesome, moderate and realistic in nature. Danish Gothic challenges the ways in which Danish literary histories have been written since the early 1800s, and the reception history of these writers reads like a Gothic tale of repression and persecution in itself. The aesthetics of the depthless image, which governs the Danish Gothic, seems, however, supremely relevant to the simulated, post-heteronormative hyper-reality of today.Item type: Item , Man at the end of history: Henrik Ibsen's works in the light of French post-Hegelian theoretical thought(2006) May, GerganaThe dissertation argues that from today's point of view, Ibsen's plays can be divided into two qualitatively different groups: the first one consisting of plays that respond to particular socio-historical moments, and as such yield a strong notion of progress and history in them, and a second one, which comprises plays capturing the notion of already living "at the end of history" and express the problems that arise for humanity in relation to that. The ultimate purpose of the endeavor is to capture and reveal those dynamics in Henrik Ibsen's thinking which, combined with his dramatic art, give his works its unique power and longevity.It argues that reading Henrik Ibsen's contemporary dramas through French post-Hegelian thought, specifically that of Alexandre Kojeve and Georges Bataille, provides the basis for a new periodization of his production. There is a major philosophical shift in the works in the sense that the first part can be read as a clear Hegelian progression (and this is valid for all the plays up to The Lady from the Sea): one play picks up the issues and ideas of the previous ones and builds gradually onto them, developing them further and taking them to a higher level of resolution. With Hedda Gabler Ibsen introduces an essentially different understanding of the human being, which can be equated to Georges Bataille's revision of the Hegelian system. Bataille claims that man at the end of history is not a happy satisfied human being, a "being-in-totality" that has acquired absolute knowledge, but that he is rather a frustrated individual left with an abundance of "unemployed negativity."Examining the shift in the works allows us to better understand the surge in popularity of Ibsen's plays around the world during the last two decades of the 20th century.The discussion also illuminates contemporary social phenomena like the "mid-life crisis" and the "quarter-life crisis": I discuss those in relation to the theatrical production of Ibsen's works today. The dissertation thus bridges between literary theory and criticism, theatrical performance and social studies in an attempt to offer a commentary on the present human condition.