Tysk höst (German Autumn) is perhaps the most famous Swedish reportage book from the twentieth century. It was written as a series of reportages by the young author Stig Dagerman and depicts the life of ordinary people in Germany in 1946. Themes such as suffering, guilt, and feelings of dejection are discussed, framed by an atmosphere of grayness. The reader is invited to empathize, not with certain individuals but rather with anyone who is cold, hungry, and bereaved of their beliefs. This chapter explores how these themes are made universally human by an advanced literary technique. Dagerman links the abstract to the concrete, the argumentation to what he has observed on the spot. This is achieved through figurative language, where key words are repeated, gradually transforming them in meaning and blurring the line between illustrated scenes and metaphors. The result becomes a paradoxical kind of gray expressiveness, where the power of the language seems to contradict the gloomy content.

Victoria Benedictsson foi uma das figuras-chaves do “Grande Avanço Moderno” sueco, que precedeu mudanças essenciais para que a sociedade escandinava se tornasse mais igualitária – e uma das mais igualitárias do mundo – em termos de gênero. O trecho do romance Pengar (“Dinheiro”) vertido aqui pela primeira vez ao português brasileiro é fundamental para se compreender também o pensamento da autora e seu suicídio, que destituiu a cena literária e feminista prematuramente de um de seus ícones.

Mild psychological effects, such as sleep-deprivation, on an oppressed and tortured human being can be characterized as “normal”. However, Shame by Salman Rushdie uses magical realist style to describe the psychological effects of shame in a patriarchal society which is based on capitalistic class values. This essay will focus on the Marxist feminist reading of the novel with a psychoanalytical perspective which is going to help analyse the effects of the oppressed female characters, Bilquis Hyder, Sufiya Zinobia and Rani Harappa.  The essay focuses on different incidents in the lives of these characters with the help of critics such as Aijaz Ahmad and Timothy Brennan. Both have written critically about Rushdie. This essay will discuss the different aspects of Marxism, feminism as well as psychoanalysis and connecting them to the novel, which would give the answers as to what shame can do to a person’s psyche. The Beauty and the Beast fairy-tale gets a different perception in this story, as Sufiya Zinobia is both the characters in one.

In this essay, I make a queer feminist analysis of four novels written by the Swedish author Sigge Stark. The novels are: Uggleboet, Manhatareklubben, Cirkus Demonio och Baskerflickan. Using Judith Butler's theories I examine the relations between sex/gender and sexuality in the four books and show how the construction of gender is performed and the heterosexual normativity is jeopardized. I also examine whether, and if so how, Sigge Stark uses the romantic and the gothic genres to include transcending gender identities and sexualities in her work. The essay also includes a contextualisation of her prerequisities as an author and the necessity in performing a critical analysis of mass produced romantic literature.

This article discusses gritty fantasy, a fantasy subgenre, which was established in the early 2000s and has since gained a lot of traction. In previous research, gritty fantasy has often been understood as a deconstructive form of fantasy that draws on the barbaric Middle Ages and subverts fantasy tropes as a reaction against earlier forms of popular fantasy. I examine, rather, the genre’s relation to the medieval and its depictions of power. Drawing on queer temporality and theories on fantasy literature and worldbuilding (Mendlsohn; Roine), I approach gritty fantasy first and foremost as a form of fantasy literature, placing it within the context of speculative fiction and asking what it does as a fantastic literature.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the didactic potential of Mikael Niemis novel Popularmusic from Vittula as it relates to working with the fundamental values of the Swedish schoolsystem from two perspectives. The first of these relates to how the novel portrays gender, witha particular focus on masculinity and how it interprets itself, femininity, and the world aroundit. The second of these perspectives relates to how it portrays the national minority grouptornedalingar and their situation in Sweden. This paper aims to illustrate not only how thesetwo perspectives are portrayed but motivate why they are useful in the work with fundamentalvalues.

To answer these questions this paper utilizes the qualitative method of close reading in theanalysis of Niemis novel. The theoretical lense through which this is done includes researcherMalin Alkestrands definition of didactic potential as well as a repertoire of gender study andpostcolonial terminology, such as otherfication, masculinity and boyology. The study findsthat the didactic potential of Mikael Niemis text as it relates to gender lay in how it breakswith the traditional gender norms of rural masculinity. Another important factor is how thetext highlights the role of femininity and music in shaping the new male identity of thenovel’s protagonist, Matti. The study also finds that the didactic potential in Niemis portrayalof tornedalingar lay in its emphasizing of the political nature and origins of the historicotherfication of said ethnic minority. 

This paper is a neuroqueer reading of the novel A Room Called Earth (2020) by Madeleine Ryan. In the paper, we explore and theorise a neuroqueer reading practice. Ryan’s novel depicts a neurodivergent experience of life and the world, through a neurodivergent literary form and style. Reading as neurodivergents, the content and the form melt together–it is more than ‘literary style’, it is a way of existing. This reading, and our writing about our reading, is not neutral. It is an engaged and personal reading, where we let our reading subjects fuse with the text. Important in our neuroqueer reading practice is the context of reading and writing. In the article, we explore how sharing our readings in a neurodivergent collective opens up an understanding of the world, the text, and ourselves, which works both as a healing process and sharing of experiences of sensory desires. We argue that the neurodivergent experience is different when experiences as a collective rather than individual experience–the feelings of reading, becomes when shared, something more and other. Earthlove is, through our reading, an experience of sensory/textual desire, and neurodivergent collective acts of love and self-love. Reading it feels like love. 

With increasing inequality in the world, having knowledge about the apparatuses maintaining unequal social structures is important. Utopian and dystopian science fiction films are a good source for analysis of social structures, due to their inherent interest in social critique and the role of semiotics in the spreading of ideology. This essay examines how ideology is presented and represented in the science fiction films Metropolis and Snowpiercer. Within a Marxist theoretical framework, the essay analyses the presence and actions of ideological state apparatuses in the films, with a secondary focus on how the ideology on display is presented to the viewer. The analysis of the films shows that several different ideological state apparatuses, such as school and politics, are represented in the films. The apparatuses are also shown to use a variety of pedagogic actions for teaching the dominant ideology of the respective film’s ruling class to the citizens of the films, such as lecturing, singing and communicating through clothing and architecture. The analysis also shows that while two different political ideologies are represented in the films, corporatism in Metropolis and neoliberalism in Snowpiercer, both ideologies serve the same purpose of maintaining the capitalist order of the films’ societies: the division of labour. The essay argues that the findings of the analysis motivate a Marxist approach to teaching, in order to actively work against inequality and provide all students with a well-rounded education, no matter what social class they belong to.

The aim of this study is to examine how the male characters are portrayed in the television series »Livet i bokstavslandet« based on Connels (1995) theory hegemonic »masculinity« and Butlers theory »gender performativity« and examine if the male characters challenge or maintain gender.

The study proceed from the following questions:

• Does the male characters in »Livet i bokstavslandet« challenge or reproduce traditional gender roles?
• Are the male characters »participant«, »subordinated« or »marginalized« based on Connells hegemonic masculinity theory?

A narrative content analysis has been conducted. The theoretical framework of the examination is based on men and masculinities studies, from a post-modern influenced perspective. Butler's concepts of performativity are of importance in this study. The results of shows, in conclusion, that »Livet i bokstavslandet« does neither challenge nor negotiate new gender roles. From a performativity point of view, the conclusion is that the series maintains prevailing gender roles.

This essay aims to examine Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, a dystopian novel, using Marxism, a utopian ideology, and also to highlight the dual critique presented by the book. This essay will use Marxism’s view on ideology and mass culture to analyse The Hunger Games. The essay argues that the power structure in the novel is critiqued from a classically Marxist perspective, based on class theory. Because the novel has a reality-show inspired element it also addresses more postmodern ideas as well, i.e. ideas of late capitalism and its influence on today’s society.

The Hunger Games was published in 2008, the same year that the financial crisis hit America. The book follows 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen who lives in District 12 in the future dystopian world of Panem. The leaders of Panem live in the Capitol, from where they control the twelve surrounding districts with an iron fist. Part of their control is enforced by the Hunger Games in which a boy and a girl from each district compete until only one survivor is left each year.

The essay finds it interesting to bring out the Marxist critique in The Hunger Games since it is written by an American author and has found most of its popularity in America, a country that has a complicated historical relationship with Marxism and communism ever since the Cold War. The Marxist critique in The Hunger Games makes the book quite radical, especially considering its place of publication and the socioeconomically fraught time in which it was published.

The Hunger Games contains two different kinds of critique: the book’s critique of today’s society, and the main character’s critique of the fictional society in which it is set. The essay suggests that readers of The Hunger Games have found that by reading about the main character’s critique of the society she lives in, they might themselves become more interested in viewing their own society in a more critical way.

In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Device” habitual perception is described as a dangerous practice, which renders one insensitive to the experiences of modernity. Importantly, the subjects’ automatized relationship with the surrounding world disrupts their ability to engage with objects. Rather than being experienced through the senses, the object is recognized through an epistemological (preconceived) framework. As a result, Shklovsky argues, “we do not see things, we merely recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes before us, as if it were prepackaged.” By making the usual strange Shklovsky’s technique of estrangement promises a relief from an alienating, consumerist experience of modernity, which “automatizes the object” instead of enabling perception: “in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.” In this article I trace the development of Shklovsky’s views on literature and the arts as an alternative way of experiencing objects in his writings during and after the Russian Revolution. I will pay particular attention to the relationship between things and words in Shklovsky’s writings produced during his exile in Berlin in 1923. The publication of the Berlin-based magazine Veshch/ Objet /Gegenstand in 1922, shortly before Shklovsky’s arrival, signals a rejection of both recognition and observation as passive consumerist practices. Instead, the manifesto published in the first issue of the magazine invites its readers to create new objects, which here is inseparable from thecreation of new social formations. I will argue that Shklovsky’s 1923 writings provide a rethinking of the word “object” in society, literature and the arts. The function of art is not to “express what lies beyond words and images,” in other words, not to point to a referent that exists as a ‘real’ object, but rather to create a world “of independently existing things.”

Literature can today be used as a tool to promote fellowship within the society, to build bridges and create an understanding of other ethnicities and cultures. Therefore, as teachers it can be beneficial to analyze stories and break down the content and then create new content with the students without any preconceptions regarding "the Other". This study is based on the method qualitative content analysis, with focus on close reading. The theoretical framework for this study is based on the post-colonial theory and the perspective of power. Which will be used to examine two Swedish children's books and how the characters are presented. In this study, I argue that norm-deviating conceptions tend to be more visible when it comes to people with a non-Swedish background.

This study considers Härskarringen (1959–61), a Swedish translation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), within the framework of translation studies and the description of norms within different fields of translation. As the work’s position as a translation has been questioned by a number of critics, the aim of the study is to identify features of the text which can be associated with this critique. The methodology employed by the study aims to separate departures in the target text from the source text within fields such as semantics and style. The departures are then ordered on the basis of linguistic form. The study suggests that the translation contains a number of features, and proposes possible explanations for these, based on the result of the study in relation to these points of departure as well as the circumstances in the context of the creation of the translation. The method used is partly based on a model developed by Rune Ingo (1991), and the results are analyzed by means of key concepts from Yvonne Lindqvist (2002). The study concludes that Härskarringen should be considered a work done mainly in accordance with an acceptable translation strategy, and thereby has characteristics of a low prestige translation. The study further considers that the critics of the translation hold, seemingly, that The Lord of the Rings should be translated as high prestige literature, and that they have reacted against the translation consequently. The study suggests that the reason for the questioning of Härskarringen’s position as a translation seems to be that the work has not been translated in accordance with the norms of the literary field to where it is today attributed. The critique can partly be viewed as a result of a raised status of The Lord of the Rings and J. R. R. Tolkien, and thus of the mobility of a work within the literary system.

This article offers a substantial reinterpretation of Mary Barton in terms of Robert Owen's ideas, especially as outlined in his early tract A New View of Society. The article contends that Gaskell's novel stages a significant reassessment of the transformative possibilities of nineteenth-century paternalism. It also suggests, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, that the reformist aspirations of a utopian thinker such as Owen can only be articulated "spectrally" in the context of Victorian class conflict: that is, by positing the kind of presence that only an irremediable absence can enable and register.

The theorisation of community as a central aspect of culture remains one of Raymond Williams’ most notable contributions. This article revisits some of its central points and critical contexts with the aim of interrogating the continuing relevance of community to any cultural project committed to the political critique of capitalism. The principal focus of the article rests on the notion, already advanced by Williams in the fifties, that any radical project of social transformation must necessarily target the dynamics of division without which capitalism itself is inconceivable. In its attempt to reconstruct the political significance of community, the article examines Williams’ debate with fellow British New Leftist E.P. Thompson and his own modified understanding of the concept in later years across the critical contexts that shaped it. The article ultimately argues (via a series of literary and historical references, including a discussion of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) that the social project of capitalism is inseparable from a strategy of ‘unworking’ or disarticulation of common life.

This chapter analyses the conceptual relevance of the notion of heterogeneity to the formulation of a radical politics in Robert Tressell’s classic working-class novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. It begins with a brief reconstruction of the social imaginaries of the mid-19th-century bourgeois novel in Britain, suggesting that the observations of urban opacity and unruly multiplicity found in authors such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell constitute a significant rehearsal of a socio-political grammar at the root of subsequent socialist developments. The chapter’s central claim is that it is with the uncovering of heterogeneity at the heart of the social, which 19th-century writing performs and a pioneering working-class text such as Tressell’s adopts, that the possibility of a discursive project of articulation emerges, reclaiming the category of class from any pre-determined or essentialist definition and opening it up to a logic of political contingency. It argues that this line of thinking, even if it never reaches the level of theoretical maturity found in continental Marxism at the turn of the century, and while its frame of reference remains that of late Victorian and Edwardian socialist debates in Britain, is comparable in some of its strategic conclusions to those of Marxist political thought in the early 20th century.

This essay explores the power dynamics embedded in the construction and perception of spatial environments in the novel The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. With the help of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space as a socially constructed phenomenon and practice, this essay argues that the characters’ experience and perception of spaces in the novel including the house and the street are entangled with the dominating forces related to gender, identity and patriarchy in the surrounding society. The essay also argues that the novel apart from revealing these power dynamics, also, through its protagonist Esperanza suggests a new kind of space, an alternative and more just space for the individual and the community. Additionally, this essay also discusses and elaborates on the pedagogical implications of using the novel with a focus on space for upper secondary students. An investigation of how individual and social spaces functions in different ways in the novel provides valuable opportunities for teachers and students to reflect and discuss power relations, social injustices and inequities in their community, and allow them, as the protagonist Esperanza, to imagine alternative and more just spaces. 

Migration and its consequences are often discussed in contemporary postcolonial discussions. This topic of migration is central in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Adichie’s portrayal of the migrating subject has placed her in the center of the Afropolitan discussion about transnational Africans and their right to represent. This essay aims to bring this discussion to light. Furthermore, with the use of Benedict Anderson’s ideas of nations as imagined communities, Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism, and Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, this essay intends to illuminate the colonial discourse of Americanah’s America. I argue that the novel’s protagonist Ifemelu’s migration to the land of the free is bordered by remnants of colonial discourse, placing her within a western array of marginalization. As Ifemelu struggles with issues connected to her migration into a culture that marginalizes and discriminates under the proud flag of “the American Dream,” she is forced to resort to mimicry of western traits, to get access to western privilege. I contend that the mimicry of western traits consequently reduces her presence in America to partial.

Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato’s Historia (1656) is not only arguably the first biography of Queen Christina of Sweden (1626‑1689) but it also provides a model for the interpretation of her life that influenced biographers over three centuries. This essay investigates Gualdo’s rhetorical strategies and their connection with Christina’s propagandistic aims. Focus is devoted to the author’s conjoint explanation of her abdication and conversion to Catholicism according to which the first is the result of the second; an interpretation that forgoes other reasons for her renunciation of the throne and that would be largely adopted by later biographers.

The purpose of this research is to analyze six children’s books from a gender perspective and thereby investigate in what way boys and girls respectively are portrayed in books.

My general question is:

How are boys and girls portrayed in children’s books?

This question has been broken down into four minor questions:

What type of clothes are the people wearing? Are people predominantly male or female? Have people specific attributes which are linked to their sex? Are people performing specific actions which are linked to their sex?

In my research I have combined quantitative and qualitative methods and my theoretical framework has been gender.

This study reveals a change in children's books with respect to how the different genders are portrayed. The progression is towards a more equal portrayal but despite this, patterns typical for the respective genders shine through.

Reading comprehension among boys is something that has deteriorated over the years. But is it so that boys do not read or do they just read things that does not count? Today there is an expanded textual concept. This means that even movies, comics, games, music and images counts as text, not just printed words on paper. I therefore want to investigate how boys in upper secondary school describes the text they encounter during their free time as well as the texts they encounter in school during the subject of Swedish. I want to see how their attitude is to these two textworlds. Six interviews with six diffrent boys from a upper secondary school north of Stockholm has been made. They are all in the alignment electricity program and are now in the second grade. They have all been reading the course “Svenska 1, 100p”. At first, the respondents said they did not read or meet text during their free time. They pointed out that they did not read books. When the respondents then learned that text could be more than only books, their answers changed and a textworld was created. The respondents describe the textworld in their free time as primarily screen-based. This is where they create a community with their friends and the texts has also the function to pass time. In the subject “Svenska 1” the respondents describe the textworld as non-screen based. They mean that they mainly read books. On the other hand, they see this as a positive thing as they are confident that the teacher chooses the "right" books and that they will learn something from it. This result shows that boys are reading, but usually not books. In the texts they encounter, one finds mostly male main characters. They are often supernaturally strong and smart and are classified as superheroes.

Taking The Great Gatsby as its central case study, this article discusses my method of teaching regional American literature in Nordic classrooms through a liberal use of maps. It argues that closely attending to the cities, states, and regions to which literary texts refer helps students better understand and scrutinize their larger claims.

The aim of this study is to examine how the basic values ​​dilemma is narratively embodied in the youth novels # Seriöstdeträckernu (Long, 2017) and Hungerspelen (Collins, 2008). The research questions of the study are: • How is the narratology presented, based on how, plot, time, narrator, characters are presented? And which themes and motifs concern the novels?

 • What similarities and differences can be detected between the selected novels in question of narration, themes and motifs?

This study have been conducted with a literature analysis, where aspects such as the novels' plot, temporality, narrative, themes, motifs and characters have been analyzed. The analysis shows that by constructing the novels' plot based on the classic dramaturgical curve, the readers´ interest in the fable is increased. The themes and motifs of the novels concern subjects such as human rights and equality, which correlates to the core values within the Swedish school.  Intimacy and identification between the reader and the main characters is created by the use of internal focalization and a self-narrative perspective. This invites the reader to reflect on the dilemmas the characters encounter and how they might possibly think of acting in similar situations.

This essay will focus on Henry V, one of William Shakespeare’s historical plays. The protagonist, King Henry V, is a character who holds immense control and prominence in the play and is therefore central to most analyses of it. Previous research has explored how power is portrayed in the play, as well as various aspects of its power structures, such as the relationship between the soldiers and the king as well as the liability for the inevitable death that accompanies battle. Based on this earlier research, this study investigates Henry’s attempted unification of his army as well as the question of responsibility and how these aspects affect the king’s power. It argues that Henry’s dynamic and sometimes ambivalent approach to these aspects help him maintain and further his power, by doubling down on his powerful position while still avoiding any negative repercussions. 

This paper examines the affective landscapes of Poland, Canada, and the US in Eva Hoffman’s autobiographical account of her immigrant/exilic life in Lost in Translation (1989). Hoffman’s reputation as a writer and intellectual was launched with this autobiography. Hoffman left Poland for Vancouver with her Jewish family in 1959, when she was 13, and lived there until college in the US, where she made her career. She lives today primarily in London. Hoffman’s autobiography is divided into three parts, dealing first with Poland, then Canada, then the US. 

Hoffman's text explicitly thematizes nostalgia. Hoffman affirms her nostalgia for her Polish childhood with a postmodern awareness. Though Lost in Translation has been celebrated for its self-reflexivity and its treatment of the links between language and subjectivity, some scholars have been highly critical of the “nostalgic” view of Poland. Hoffman's work is clearly invested in the dynamics and the affect of remembering and forgetting particular times and particular places. In this paper, I examine Hoffman's understandings of nostalgia, and of the affective landscapes with which she engages. Poland, Canada, and the US have powerful associations, but I focus on primarily on Poland and Canada, emphasizing the overlooked importance of Hoffman's Canadian years.  I am particularly interested in exploring how affect—defined roughly as “something that moves, that triggers reactions, forces, or intensities . . ., simultaneously engaging the mind and body, reason and emotions” (Berberich, Campbell and Hudson 314), and including the affect of nostalgia—is represented and textually communicated with readers. Thus, I look at the effects of Hoffman’s privileging of lyricism as a mode and mood for life-writing.

This paper examines the appropriation and redirection of the Gothic in two contemporary, Native-centered feature films that concern a history that can be said to haunt many Native North American communities today: the history of Indian boarding schools. Georgina Lightning’s Older than America (2008) and Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009) make use of Gothic conventions and the figures of the ghost and the vampire to visually relate the history and horrors of Indian boarding schools. Each of these Native-centered films displays a cinematic desire to decenter Eurocentric histories and to counter mainstream American genres with histories and forms of importance to Native North American peoples. Willmott’s film critiques mythologies of the West and frontier heroism, and Lightning’s attempts to sensitize non-Native viewers to contemporary Native North American concerns while also asserting visual sovereignty and affirming spiritual values. 

This paper compares Eva Hoffman’s representation of Poland and its effect on her immigrant/exilic life in Lost in Translation with Lisa Appignanesi’s representations in Losing the Dead. Their works are published about 10 years apart. While Lost in Translation has been viewed as an important work expressing a postmodern awareness of the links between language and subjectivity, a few scholars have been highly critical of the “nostalgic” view of Poland that Hoffman presents. Losing the Dead, though different tone, is also invested in the dynamics of remembering and forgetting. The author has very few first-hand memories of her childhood in Poland, however, and her work of postmemory thus straddles the borders of biography, family history, and memoir. Svetlana Boym’s discussion of restorative and reflective nostalgia provides an important framework for a comparison of these two works’ representations of Poland. While it is tempting to view Hoffman’s work as an example of restorative nostalgia and Appignanesi’s as an example of reflective nostalgia, I argue that these distinctions are not clear cut, and the representations of Poland in these two works complicate Boym’s typology.

Family and kinship carry special significance to Holocaust survivors and their descendants. In autobiographies and family memoirs, writers of what Marianne Hirsch terms the postmemory generation employ different narrative strategies for coming to terms with the ways in which the Holocaust has marked their identities and family ties. This article focuses on women’s writing of the postmemory generation, examining three works in English by daughters of survivors in the UK, the US, and Canada, written during the 1990s. It investigates the narrative strategies used by Anne Karpf, Helen Fremont, and Lisa Appignanesi to represent maternal sexual agency and vulnerability in a survival context. It suggests that these representations are strongly influenced by matrophobia and matrophilia, defined as the conflicting dread of becoming and desire to be one’s mother, which are themselves strongly conditioned by Holocaust history, particularly the gendered history of vulnerability among women in open hiding during the war.

The article discusses the work of the émigré writer Michał Moszkowicz. After a brief presentation of his biografy  and an analysis of his key novels, the author of the article concludes that - contrary to popular opinion expressed by reviewers - the most important issu in this prose is not multiculturalism, not the transcending of language barriers, or the attempt to understand Otherness (with the writer's biografy suggests). Moszkowicz's novels are, however, - as evidenced by the article - very Polish, arch-Polisch. This is not only because Moszkowicz writes in Polish and refers to the tradition of Polish literature but also because he fights with Polishness. Polishness which irritates him, which sometimes hurts, but which is always very important to him. The most important issue in Moszkowicz's novels is not the matter of the social, cultural, or national affiliation of his hero but an analysis of the transformation of his individual identity.

Syftet med artikeln är att undersöka hur läsaren uppmuntras att hantera de frågor som tematiseras i ett urval böcker om Greta Thunberg och hur agens (både läsarens och Gretas) gestaltas genom text och bild.1 Vårt material är två böcker om Greta Thunberg som har givits ut på de tyska, franska, engelska, danska, italienska och svenska bokmarknaderna. För att problem-atisera och fördjupa vår studie av bokomslagen undersöker vi också de ”att-göra-listor” som har bifogats några av böckerna. Det gör vi för att studera den roll som läsaren tillskrivs. De verbaltextliga elementen analyseras med utgångspunkt i systemisk-funktionell grammatik och illustrationerna med retorisk bildanalys. Med detta som utgångspunkt frågar vi: hur kommer Gretas och andra barns agens till uttryck?

The article presents a reading of Marina Tsvetaeva's 'Poema lestnitsy' (1926) as a critique of the reifying ontology of modern society. The back staircase of the poor becomes the locus of a burning lyrical revolt by the elemental nature of things against their objectifying use. I argue that the poem's social and lyrical pathos was inspired by Vladimir Maiakovskii's 'Oblako v shtanakh' (1914-1915), but that the theme may also be related to a Modernist ontological debate. The poem presents a metapoetic image of the elemental, non-reifiable poetic world and its resistance to commodification.

This article discusses the demonic poetics that the Russian Modernist poet Marina Cvetaeva develops in a series of articles that she wrote in the 1930s, with particular focus on The Devil (1935) and Puškin and Pugačev (1936-1937). I examine the demonology as a means of treating the question of the nature of poetic language. I relate this question to the notion of a Poetry of Intent that Cvetaeva developed in 1924, and to the Romantic tradition as a ground for her Modernist poetics. The central question that governs Cvetaeva's demonic mythologizations is what it is that separates literature, conceived as poetry or romance, from other forms of speaking or imagining the world. I show that Cvetaeva gives more or less the same answer to this question in all these essays, and that is that literature in a secret and oblique way can speak of living life, that is, life in its living form, beyond the categories of representation.