The primary aim of this study is to gain insight into the level of formality in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms in upper secondary schools and in SFI (Swedish for Immigrants) classrooms in Sweden. This research specifically examines how EFL and SFI teachers perceive and integrate formal language into their teaching practices. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 teachers, including 5 EFL and 5 SFI teachers to gather qualitative data. The interviews ranged from 20-45 minutes and were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using a thematic analysis to identify recurring themes and patterns within the interview transcripts. The findings reveal distinct perceptions and practices between EFL and SFI teachers regarding formal language. EFL teachers view formal language as essential for promoting social norms, such as politeness and respect. They incorporate formal language using formal texts, advanced formal vocabulary, and sentence structures. Some EFL teachers prioritize the use of formal language based on specific lesson goals, while others are influenced by the informal nature of Swedish culture and prefer to use informal language in their classrooms. On the other hand, SFI teachers perceive formal language as flexible and context dependent. They emphasize practical applications of formal language such as writing emails and formal letters at a basic level. SFI teachers focus on clarity and correctness over strict formal language rules and the aim of such focus is to ensure that the students learn the basic Swedish language necessary for social integration.

This essay focuses on the pedagogical benefits of using fantasy literature in the classroom as it relates to the Swedish school’s democratic values of anti-racism and working for a just society. It examines the representations of racial prejudice, discrimination, and othering among wizards and muggles which are explicitly or implicitly present throughout the Harry Potter series as well as what the representations of inequality can offer in terms of inculcating democratic values and critical thinking in a Swedish upper secondary classroom. This essay also argues for the use of Harry Potter in the EFL classroom since the novel’s complexity and popularity can work as an incentive for students to analyze the ways that the fantasy world relates to our own society. Since the focus of this essay is racial discrimination, prejudice, and otherness the critical lens is Critical Race Theory and anti-oppressive education theory.

This essay aims to explore the complex interplay between race, religion, and violence as depicted in The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley. Through an exploration of Frantz Fanon's theories regarding recognition and violence, alongside James H. Cone’s concept of Black theology, the essay establishes a foundation for the analysis. This analysis will analyze Malcolm X’s evolving transformative identity and political agenda. The essay aims to understand Malcolm X’s engagement with Islamic teachings, his critique of Christianity, and his experiences with violence, and how these themes together shape his social and political agenda in his pursuit of liberation. Malcolm X challenges the racial narrative and argues that White people are devils. This perception undergoes a profound shift after his pilgrimage to Mecca. This transformative journey sheds light on the factors that shaped Malcolm X’s perspective on religion, racial separation, self-defense, and liberation. This essay argues that Malcolm X underwent a profound evolution of ideological perspectives after his affiliation with the NOI and his trip to Mecca, leading to a deeper understanding of Black liberation and the complexities of racial identity.

This is an introduction to our special issue on literature and economic inequality. Beginning with a discussion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Origin of Inequality’, and moving on to a brief analysis of the current juncture of the conditions of inequality and the conditions of literature and literary study, we introduce our seven contributions and try to frame the challenges literary study faces today.

The English Department at Högskolan Dalarna, Sweden, participates in a distance-learning program with the Faculty of Education at Vietnam National University. Students who enroll in this program are teachers of English at secondary or tertiary institutions, and will study half time for two years to complete a Master’s degree in English Linguistics. The distance program, adapted specifically to accommodate the Vietnamese students in terms of cultural differences as well as inexperience with distance methodology, is characterized by three design features: testing, technical training, and fostering a community of learners. The design of the courses also reflects a learner-centered approach that addresses common problem areas in distance education by promoting interactivity. Central to the overall program is the maintenance of different channels of communication, reflecting an effort to support the students academically and socially, both as individuals and members of a learning community. In this way, the effects of physical and cultural distances are minimized.

This chapter focuses on a selection of single-panel comics by two Swedish comics artists, seeking to explicate how gender norms are invoked and subverted in depicted talk-in-interaction. Informing the analyses are theories of positioning and framing, which aim to help us make sense of interactions as taking place in different sorts of occasions, how these differences are signalled, and how we behave according to social conventions and moral commitments. The female perspective on these conventions and commitments is expressed in the comics of Hemmingsson and Sjöberg, in which frames and positions are made particularly salient in the single-panel format. Of particular significance is the use of humour to reveal absurdities of gender roles, gender inequality, and sexism. The chapter thus also investigates how linguistic resistance to positioning, framing, and conversational script represents a feminist act of subversion and solidarity.

This chapter explores the status of English-language popular culture throughout the Nordic countries with regard to its relation to attitudes toward English and its effect on everyday discourse. The traditions and contemporary developments of English as an academic subject in the Nordic countries reveal an important shift in the symbolic capital of English. While English as a linguistic system and Anglophone literature and culture once symbolized erudition and high intellectual pursuits, the abstract idea and concrete manifestations of English in the Nordic countries are now more likely to invoke Anglophone popular culture and media artifacts. However, the close association between popular culture and the English language has fostered a Nordic-wide relationship to English that deviates from native Anglophone norms, whereby the filtering of English through popular culture encourages the use of English as a language of play and imbues a distance to its affective properties. The chapter presents a pan-Nordic overview of the rise of Anglophone popular culture and the effects of the stronghold that the English language enjoys in the Nordic countries as a result of the wholesale adoption of English-language popular culture. 

In this paper, I investigate the Swedish, non-native use of English swear words in Swedish-language comic strips. I first consider the established relationships between both swearing and humor, and comics and humor. I propose that swear word usage and the comic strip framework contribute to a mutual feedback loop, whereby the comic strip derives its humor from the use of English swear words, while at the same time the comic strip context, by invoking a play frame, primes the swear word usage for humorous interpretation. Modeling Siegel (1995), I then consider how a code-switch to English serves as a framing device or contextualization cue for humor in Swedish-language contexts. The analysis of a selection of Swedish comic strips draws from the Encryption Theory of Humor (Flamson and Barrett, 2008), and suggests that humor created via the Swedish practice of swearing in English is a function of shared background knowledge that capitalizes on the fundamental incongruity of two discourse systems operating under different norms of appropriateness.

This book focuses on the unexplored context of contemporary Swedish comic strips as sites of innovative linguistic practices, where humor is derived from language play and creativity, often drawing from English and other European languages as well as social and regional dialects of Swedish. The overall purpose of the book is to highlight linguistic playfulness in Swedish comic strips, as an example of practices as yet unobserved and unaccounted for in theories of linguistic humor as applied to comics scholarship. The book familiarizes the reader with the Swedish language and linguistic culture as well as contemporary Swedish comic strips, with chapters focusing on specific strategies of language play and linguistic humor, such as mocking Swedish dialects and Swedish-accented foreign language usage, invoking English language popular culture, swearing in multiple languages, and turn-final code-switching to English to signal the punchline. The book will appeal to readers interested in humor, comics, or how linguistic innovation, language play, and language contact each can further the modern development of language, exemplified by the case of Swedish. 

This chapter presents an analysis of intranet postings generated within a Swedish web consultancy during its pursuit of a tobacco company as client. Drawing from theories of crisis management, Beers Fägersten focuses on the emergent conflict and debate between employees who are in favor of having a tobacco company as a client, and those who are against it. The intranet thread reflects the use of discursive strategies typical of conflict management, but also strategies specific to the digital environment. A recurring theme in the debate is the navigation, negotiation and distinction of personal vs. corporate identities and interests.

This article is an investigation of the use of English-language swear words by Swedish, non-native speaker PewDiePie in the context of self-recorded, Let’s Play horror videos uploaded to the video-sharing website, YouTube. Situating PewDiePie within the greater media landscape to establish both his success and notoriety, this article addresses the local interpretation of the globalization of English and the use of English swear words in Swedish media. The practice of swearing in the gaming context is discussed, and swearing instances in a selection of three of PewDiePie’s horror game videos are analyzed. The article puts forth the argument that the use of English swear words contributes to the performance of PewDiePie as a specific, online persona, one that is both in line with the context of video gaming and conducive to a para-social relationship, allowing PewDiePie to achieve the overall goals of communicating with his viewers as peers and reducing the social distance between them. The article concludes that PewDiePie’s practice of social swearing not only simulates casual conversation between friends, but actively reduces social distance, creates the illusion of intimacy, and contributes to his unprecedented success on YouTube.

In this paper I present, analyze and consider the implications of the use of English swear words in Swedish media. First, I investigate the relationship between language and the media, focusing on the role of standard language forms in media discourse. I continue by exploring, within an Anglophone context, the use of swear words in the media. Next I present a brief survey of the use of English in Swedish. Finally, I present examples of the use of English-language swear words in Swedish media, showing how English-language swear words are appropriated by speakers of Swedish and suggesting that the use of English swear words in the media ratifies this appropriation, in turn establishing this practice as standard. I discuss the implications of this development in terms of the use of English swear words within a non-native speaker speech community, how usage may be in conflict with English native-speaker norms, and how the use of English swear words might come to characterize modern Swedish as well as a Swedish variety of English.

Catchphrases have long been a hallmark of US-American sit-coms and dramas, as well as reality, game and variety show programming. Because the phenomenon of the television catchphrase developed throughout the era of network, commercial broadcasting under Federal Communications Commission guidelines regulating profanity in network television, catchphrases traditionally have not included swear words. Nevertheless, certain past television catchphrases can be regarded as euphemistic alternatives of swearing expressions (e.g. ‘Kiss my grits!’), while contemporary catchphrases from cable or streaming series do include explicit swearing (e.g. ‘Don’t fuck it up!’). We examine a database of 168 popular catchphrases from a 70-year period of US-American television programming according to categories for bad language and impoliteness formulae. We identify three categories of catchphrases based on structural-functional similarities to swearing expressions, and we trace the distribution of these categories over time and across networks. The data reveal a trend towards explicit swearing in catchphrases over time, not only in series on cable and streaming services, but across networks. We conclude that the expressive nature of catchphrases and their structural-functional properties render the inclusion of swear words both more palatable to a television audience and more compatible with television norms, thus propagating catchphrase swearing on cable and streaming television services, and mitigating the use of swear words on network television. Due to appropriation phenomena, swearing catchphrases may serve to blur the lines between actually swearing and simply invoking a swearing catchphrase, thereby potentially increasing tolerance for swearing both on television and off.

The sitcom Superstore aired on NBC from 2015 to 2021. In its sixth and final season (ending March 2021), the series explicitly addressed how the coronavirus pandemic affected the working conditions of the staff and management of “Cloud 9”—a fictional big-box store based in Saint Louis, Missouri. This chapter examines the ways in which the character interaction serves two distinct functions: first, to provide the viewing audience with general information about the coronavirus and the pandemic; and second, to depict the difficulties of dealing with the pandemic as an essential worker. The series uses humor to problematize the essential worker status of the Cloud 9 employees as superordinate to their status of individuals with a right to protect their health and minimize exposure to the virus.

This edited collection explores how the relationship between comic art and feminism has been shaped by global, transnational, and local trends, curating analyses of multinational comic art that encompass themes of gender, sexuality, power, vulnerability, assault, abuse, taboo, and trauma. The chapters illuminate in turn the defining features of the aesthetics, materiality, and thematic content of their source material - often expressed with humorous undertones of self-reflection or social criticism - as well as recurring strategies of visualising and narrating female experiences. Broadening the research perspective of feminist comics to include national comics cultures peripheral to the cultural centers of Anglo-American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese comics, the anthology explores how the dominant narrative or history of canonical works can be challenged or deconstructed by local histories of comics and feminism and their transnational connections, and how local histories complement or challenge the current understanding of the relationship between feminism and comic art. This is an essential collection for scholars and students in comics studies, women and gender studies, media studies, and literature.

Swearing has traditionally been associated with spoken language; however, swear words are appearing more often in print and, notably, explicitly featured in commercial products. In this paper, we consider this development an example of the commodification of swear words, or 'swear words for sale'. Our analyses of English-language swear word products show that the taboo nature of swear words is exploited and capitalized upon for commercial gain. We argue that swear word commodities trade on sociolinguistically incongruous aspects of swear word usage, increasing salability of the swear word products by targeting specific demographics. Specifically, we analyze (1) women's apparel and accessories, (2) domestic items and home décor, and (3) children's products for adults or articles targeting parents of young children. The study concludes with a discussion of whether the popularization of swearing via such commodification may ultimately result in a loss of distinctiveness and devaluation.

The first chapter of the anthology Comic Art and Feminism in the Baltic Sea Region: Transnational Perspectives introduces the reader to the field of feminist comic art and graphic narrative in the Baltic Sea region. Acknowledging the contributions of Anglo-American feminist comics artists of the 1970s who laid the groundwork for continued production and progress transnationally, the authors highlight parallel developments in Sweden and Finland, which have resulted in the current era of comic art dominated by each country’s growing cadre of feminist comics artists. The success and momentum of Swedish and Finnish feminist comic art warrant an exploration of transnational reverberations, in order to highlight practices and characteristics which have mobilised to extend across national boundaries. Exploring a wide range of work by comics artists from the Baltic Sea region, the anthology’s 12 chapters both illuminate the defining features of aesthetics, materiality, and thematic content of feminist comic art, and analyse the recurring strategies of visualising and narrating female, non-binary, or queer experiences.

Swearing fulfils a range of interpersonal pragmatic functions and also acts as a distinguishing feature of speakers and contexts. In broadcast media, swearing has traditionally been censored or at least limited in its deployment; although when used, it serves characterization, interactional, and narrative functions. In this article, we consider the Disney+ television series Only Murders in the Building (OMITB, 2021–), in which swearing is not subject to standard media constraints, due to its provision on a streaming service. Freed from such constraints, OMITB is distinctive in its unusually high frequency and dispersion of swearing across characters and contexts. Compared with both real-life and media-based analyses of language use, the swearing in OMITB reflects neither real-life nor standard broadcast patterns. In this paper, we investigate how swearing is used by the characters, and what it is ‘doing’ in the series. In particular, we highlight the role of swearing in affiliation and relationship-building, both between characters in the story world, and between the series and its viewers. Our analysis contributes to understanding the pragmatic functions of media swearing.

Any behavior that arouses, as swearing does, controversy, disagreement, disdain, shock, and indignation as often as it imbues passion, sincerity, intimacy, solidarity, and jocularity should be an obvious target of in-depth scholarship. Rigorous, scholarly investigation of the practice of swearing acknowledges its social and cultural significance, and allows us to discover and better understand the historical, psychological, sociological, and linguistic aspects (among others) of swearwords and swearword usage. The present volume brings together a range of themes and issues central to the existing knowledge of swearing and considers these in two key ‘new’ arenas, that is, in languages other than English, and/or in contexts and media other than spoken interaction. Many of the chapters analysed are based on large and robust collections of data, such as corpora or questionnaire responses, which allow for patterns of swearing to emerge. In other chapters, personally observed instances of swearing comprise the focus, allowing for a close analysis of the relationship between sociolinguistic context and pragmatic function. In each chapter, the cultural aspects of swearing are considered, ultimately affirming the importance of the study of swearing, and further establishing the legitimacy of swearing as a target of research.

In Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, knowledge is illegal, and popular culture is promoted as a way to control society. Guy Montag, the central character of the book, undergoes through a journey of liberation from the oppressive system to the further achievement of the forbidden knowledge. The female characters in the book are key to his awakening and evolvement. Unfortunately during the course of the story these women perish. Using the theories of Simone De Beauvoir and Janice Radway, this essay explores the concept of “otherness” and the consumption of popular culture in a patriarchal and oppressive society. This paper also argues that the construction of the masculinity of the protagonist would not be possible without the women, and their death is a violent reaffirmation of a patriarchal order.

The present study conducts a telecinematic discourse analysis of the popular Netflix series 13 Reasons Why and investigates how the linguistic performances of the main characters establish patterns, which provide the series a structure. The aim is todetermine how the series is structured linguistically and how distinct character identity is achieved through language.  To do this, transcriptions are made of different parts of the main character’s narration and the second main character’s dialogues in each episode of the series’ first season. Previous research indicates the significant role of different linguistic elements when construing characters and establishing narrative cohesion, such as repetitions, discourse markers, expressivity, stability, logical sense and style of language. This study provides further illustration of how narrative cohesion and characterization are achieved through telecinematic discourse. Such strategies provide the series a structure, which in turn supports variation in characters and setting.

This essay explores how James Baldwin’s short story Going to Meet the Man depicts racist attitudes toward African-Americans in American society. Further, this essay also shows how racism is linked to a circulation of emotions that unconsciously generates a xenophobic nation affecting even those who implicitly are regarded as genuine citizens of that community. By using two theoretical perspectives, Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies and some of Freud’s concepts from psychoanalysis, this essay analyzes Baldwin’s text and discovers how the American nation needs to accept and recognize its racist history, just as a child needs to acknowledge his or her fear when experiencing traumatic events. Baldwin’s narrative reinforces racist stereotypes while at the same time using the text to write back to a society that at the time of writing had not expected, but indeed needed, an African-American man to publish a book from a white man’s perspective.

How do particular genres and forms, with their distinct conventions and histories, shape representations of refugee experience? How do representations of refugeedom transform the conventions of genres such as memoir, theatre, comics, song, the essay, poetry or the novel? In this chapter, we outline a humanities approach to refugee studies with reference to significant contributions in the field. Then, we introduce the genres and forms covered in this collection and the relevance of these forms for claiming human rights: the memoir, the graphic novel, poetry, theatre, song, documentary film, media art, the Bildungsroman and the literary novel. 

This volume brings together research on the forms, genres, media and histories of refugee migration. Chapters come from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches, including literature, film studies, performance studies and postcolonial studies. The goal is to bring together chapters that use the perspectives of the arts and humanities to study representations of refugee migration. The chapters of the anthology are organized around specific forms and genres: life-writing and memoir, the graphic novel, theater and music, film and documentary, coming-of-age stories, street literature, and the literary novel. 

This essay analyzes the theme of the pursuit of beauty in The Secret History. It analyzes the main characters’ concept of beauty, their manner of seeking beauty, as well as the result of this search. For this analysis, I use Friedrich Nietzsche’s theories of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as outlined in The Birth of Tragedy and in scholarly texts that analyze TBT— which describe the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy as the opposed worlds of order and madness— to define the main characters’ concept of beauty. The narrator of the novel once says that “beauty is terror” (Tartt 45), a statement which paints beauty as harsh and shocking, and potentially destructive. Likewise, in this essay I argue that for these characters beauty is created through the interplay between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and that its pursuit leads to destruction. I analyze this through the characters of Richard Papen, Henry Winter, and Bunny Corcoran. Richard and Henry pursue beauty in that the actions they take are aimed at embodying an aesthetic ideal. In Richard’s case, it is his longing for beauty which leads him to imitate and join the classicists— particularly by mimicking their socio-economic class— and which eventually places him in a disordered Dionysian world of madness and murder. Henry, on the other hand, is the embodiment of Apollonian order, and it is his search for beauty through a bacchanal which leads him to commit murder twice and, eventually, to take his own life. Lastly, Bunny is different in that he is neither beautiful nor interested in beauty as his peers define it. It is because of this that he is excluded from the others’ pursuit of beauty, that he is murdered, and that his murder is justifiable in the eyes of his murderers. This study finds that, in The Secret History, where beauty is defined as the dance between Apollonian order and Dionysian madness, the Dionysian ends up as the victorious half of the dichotomy, causing the loss of reason and the triumph of destruction and disaster. This portrayal of beauty as destruction and vice versa, rather than serving as the vehicle for a moral indictment, is instead the very purpose of the novel.

Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism proposes a fresh approach to contemporary fictional engagements with the idea of crisis in capitalism and its various social and economic manifestations. The book investigates how late-twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction has imagined, interpreted, and in most cases resisted, the collapse of the socio-economic structures built after the Second World War and their replacement with a presumably immaterial order of finance-led economic development. Through a series of detailed readings of the words of authors Martin Amis, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo, Zia Haider Rahman, John Lanchester, Paul Murray and Zadie Smith among others, this study sheds light on the embattled and decidedly unstable nature of contemporary capitalism.

In this article, I argue that Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know offers a suggestive but ultimately problematic interrogation of the link between knowledge and finance in the context of contemporary “cognitive capitalism” and the 2008 crisis. The novel’s almost fetishistic relation to knowledge, primarily represented by the narrator’s encyclopedic and relentless discursive presence, compounded with his insistence on a circumscribed and experientially detached narrative temporality, suggests a fundamentally evasive strategy. For all its complexity and stringency, “knowledge” functions as an ideological cover for a deeply political crisis, while narration itself signals a foreclosure of agency and responsibility which ultimately fails, exposing the limits of financialization’s own discursive justifications.

This article proposes a fresh contextual reading of Amis’s Money as a novel that engages the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical attention has focused largely on its satirical examination of the Thatcherite ethos, but Money is also centrally preoccupied with the collapse of postwar capitalism’s institutional structures of inter-class coordination. As a result of this process, the social phenomenology constructed by the novel is not only defined by growing inequality and economic fetishism, but also by a pervasive sense of political uncontrollability over the accumulation process.