Autobiography can be thought of as, among other things, a speech of defence. The Estonian-Finnish author Hella Wuolijoki started writing her autobiography in prison and it very much reads as a ...legitimization of her political life choices. The article investigates how Wuolijoki depicts her own politicization, and how she plays with different author names in order to destabilize a taken-for-granted author position. The material used is her three part autobiography/memoirs, in which she explicitly declares that she is less interested in the facts of her life, but rather wants to keep them in their original memory-form. This gives her the freedom to recount events she deems important for her self-formation, rather than events or general interest. Feminist and autobiographical theory is used as a tool to investigate how dislodging the authorial position can open new ways of emphasising a woman’s political development. Thus, the literary formation of a political and feminist persona can be studied through her works. In this article I relate Wuolijoki’s writing to a way of theorizing the position of the political woman that could be found in Alexandra Kollontai’s pamphlet on the socialist New Woman written in 1918. The article analyses how Wuolijoki legitimizes her political activities by recounting her life as always intricately connected to contemporary political events. The article shows that political autobiography is a concept that can open new perspectives on women’s life writing and that the construction of an autobiographical persona that combines the concepts of woman and political may rely, as in this case, on types or models found in literature rather than life. Swedish: Självbiografi kan ses som, bland annat, ett försvarstal. Den estnisk-finska författaren Hella Wuolijoki började skriva sin självbiografi i fängelset för att legitimera sina politiska livsval. Artikeln undersöker hur Wuolijoki skildrar sin egen politisering och hur hon leker med olika författarnamn för att destabilisera en förgivet tagen författarposition. Det analyserade materialet utgörs av hennes självbiografi/memoarer i tre band i vilka hon explicit deklarerar att hon är mindre intresserad av fakta och snarare vill behålla händelserna så som hon minns dem. Detta ger henne friheten att behandla skeenden som hon anser viktiga för sin egen formering snarare än sådant som kan vara av allmänintresse. Feministisk och självbiografisk teori används som ett verktyg för att undersöka hur förskjutningen av författarens ställning kan öppna nya sätt att betona en kvinnas politiska utveckling. I artikeln jämför jag Wuolijokis skrivande med Alexandra Kollontajs sätt att teoretisera den nya kvinnan i pamfletten den socialistiska Nya Kvinnan från 1918. Artikeln analyserar hur Wuolijoki legitimerar sina politiska aktiviteter genom att ständigt relatera till samtida politiska händelser. Artikeln visar att en läsning ur ett politiskt självbiografiskt perspektiv kan öppna för nya perspektiv för kvinnors life-writing och att konstruktionen av ett självbiografiskt persona som kombinerar begreppen kvinna och politik, åtminståne i det här fallet, är beroende av typer och modeller som finns i skönlitteraturen snarare än livet.
Sven Backlund (1887-1953) was a Swedish journalist who worked for the Social Democratic Party leader and Prime Minister Hjalmar Branting, and wrote for several left-wing newspapers. In the interwar ...years, he published a number of handbooks in internationalism, and his engagement in workers' education combined experiences from journalism with his work as a correspondent and interpreter at the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization. The article discusses Backlund's approach to internationalism, focusing especially on the idea of power balance and how it could be achieved.
The fact that dystopian literature has a great potential for envisioning alternative futures is elaborated in this article in relation to the Finnish/British author Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water ...(2013). Itäranta’s gloomy low-fi novel is read alongside contemporary ecocritical theory with a focus on issues of vernacular cultures and knowledges versus ideas of cosmopolitan planetary citizenship. Reflections are made about the profound nature of the concept of borders: cultural, temporal, informational, geographical, political, in the event of massive catastrophes. The article investigates how Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ and Ursula Heise’s ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ are played out in a novel, and how the novel in turn poses important questions for ecocritical theory. Thus, the interplay between ecocritical literary theory, on the one hand, and literature, on the other, is highlighted. What can dystopia make visible in contemporary theory?
Women participated actively in the Finnish Civil War in January 1918-April 1918. The radicalization of the Finnish Social Democratic Party and the embracing of a revolutionary discourse sent tremors ...also to Sweden. In this article, I investigate how the Swedish Social Democratic women's journal Morgonbris addresses women's political violence in the period surrounding the Russian Revolution in March 1917, the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover and the following Civil War in Finland early 1918.
Morgonbris did not shun from reporting or debating women's political violence, however, as this article shows there is a great discrepancy between how different acts of violence are understood in the greater discourse. Some violence, and especially some acts of violence committed by women, is clearly framed as more legitimate than others.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
I det här kapitlet undersöker jag hur Elin Wägner (1882–1949) under början av 1920-talet förmedlade erfarenheter från ett krigshärjat Europa för en svensk publik. Hennes många roller i offentligheten ...som journalist, författare, feministisk agitator och fredsrörelseaktivist gjorde henne till en av tidens viktiga politiska aktörer trots att hon i egentlig mening inte var politiker. Speciellt fokuserar jag på dilemmat med olika skriftställarroller – Wägner upplevde att det var svårt, snarast omöjligt, att kombinera politisk journalistik med skönlitterärt författarskap. Hon skrev själv om hur kraven på journalistisk opartiskhet markant skilde sig från författarens engagerande och fiktionaliserande skrivande, trots att de behandlade
Semiperifera anmärkningar Katarina Leppänen
Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap,
01/2018, Letnik:
48, Številka:
1-2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Semiperipheral Notes. A Discussion on the Meaning of Region in World Literature The article discusses how a view from the semi-periphery of the Nordic countries, with specific focus on the region as ...the scale of analysis, may theoretically challenge world literature. Understanding region as ‘direction’ or orientation suggest a rethinking of what regionality can encompass. The world-system theory of the Warwick Research Collective, which explicitly emphasizes the importance of semi-periphery, is contrasted with postcolonial theory. Although postcolonial theory cannot uncritically be applied in a Nordic context, it may still serve as a more creative stance when investigating the literature of the early 20th century and the importance of vernacularization of national literatures combined with a cosmopolitan attraction.
This article approaches the Finnish-Estonian Jill-of-all-trades, Hella Wuolijoki (1886-1954), through her autobiographical writings. She was active in business, politics, science and culture during a ...turbulent time in Finnish history, and her radical political stance and unorthodox methods made her a controversial person. The article revisits the concept of persona, as it has been used in history of science, in order to analyse how Wuolijoki used her autobiographical writings to expand the field of acceptable actions for women, and to justify her own life choices.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article discusses the large-scale and world-encompassing aspirations of digital humanities and world literature and their methodological accordance with the analysis of literature in smaller ...languages and of texts understood in social, transnational, and gendered contexts. Are Digital Humanities and World Literature establishing themselves as fields utilizing analytical tools that are at odds with the aims and perspectives of feminist literary history and reception history as a part of literary history? We argue that gender research and theory is insufficiently developed in both computational literary history and World Literature. An unproblematic understanding of translations, canonization, English as a global language, and the use of large-scale computational methods and formalized interpretive models is in many cases not beneficial for the understanding of texts by women writers or from feminist perspectives. Drawing on feminist criticism of computational methods and arguments for specialized rather than generalized knowledge about literary history, we propose that digitization in some form, be it a bibliographical database or digitization of a corpus of texts, may be thought of as part of the research process in projects oriented towards gender and cultural exchange.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Autobiography can be thought of as, among other things, a speech of defence. The Estonian-Finnish author Hella Wuolijoki started writing her autobiography in prison and it very much reads as a ...legitimization of her political life choices. The article investigates how Wuolijoki depicts her own politicization, and how she plays with different author names in order to destabilize a taken-for-granted author position. The material used is her three part autobiography/memoirs, in which she explicitly declares that she is less interested in the facts of her life, but rather wants to keep them in their original memory-form. This gives her the freedom to recount events she deems important for her self-formation, rather than events or general interest. Feminist and autobiographical theory is used as a tool to investigate how dislodging the authorial position can open new ways of emphasising a woman’s political development. Thus, the literary formation of a political and feminist persona can be studied through her works. In this article I relate Wuolijoki’s writing to a way of theorizing the position of the political woman that could be found in Alexandra Kollontai’s pamphlet on the socialist New Woman written in 1918. The article analyses how Wuolijoki legitimizes her political activities by recounting her life as always intricately connected to contemporary political events. The article shows that political autobiography is a concept that can open new perspectives on women’s life writing and that the construction of an autobiographical persona that combines the concepts of woman and political may rely, as in this case, on types or models found in literature rather than life.
Swedish: Självbiografi kan ses som, bland annat, ett försvarstal. Den estnisk-finska författaren Hella Wuolijoki började skriva sin självbiografi i fängelset för att legitimera sina politiska livsval. Artikeln undersöker hur Wuolijoki skildrar sin egen politisering och hur hon leker med olika författarnamn för att destabilisera en förgivet tagen författarposition. Det analyserade materialet utgörs av hennes självbiografi/memoarer i tre band i vilka hon explicit deklarerar att hon är mindre intresserad av fakta och snarare vill behålla händelserna så som hon minns dem. Detta ger henne friheten att behandla skeenden som hon anser viktiga för sin egen formering snarare än sådant som kan vara av allmänintresse. Feministisk och självbiografisk teori används som ett verktyg för att undersöka hur förskjutningen av författarens ställning kan öppna nya sätt att betona en kvinnas politiska utveckling. I artikeln jämför jag Wuolijokis skrivande med Alexandra Kollontajs sätt att teoretisera den nya kvinnan i pamfletten den socialistiska Nya Kvinnan från 1918. Artikeln analyserar hur Wuolijoki legitimerar sina politiska aktiviteter genom att ständigt relatera till samtida politiska händelser. Artikeln visar att en läsning ur ett politiskt självbiografiskt perspektiv kan öppna för nya perspektiv för kvinnors life-writing och att konstruktionen av ett självbiografiskt persona som kombinerar begreppen kvinna och politik, åtminståne i det här fallet, är beroende av typer och modeller som finns i skönlitteraturen snarare än livet.
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