As a pervasive historical construct that is both foreign and familiar, the USA has a looming presence in Swedish media discourse. Swedish journalists' views of the USA can best be described as ambivalent - critical of a unilateral or too passive US foreign policy, while at the same time being heavily influenced by many aspects of the American economic model and culture. This article presents the results of an analysis of Swedish editorials, debate, commentary and cultural articles about the USA in time periods between 1984 and 2009. During these three decades USA actions are broadly framed against the backdrop of Cold War, globalization and cultural contestation paradigms respectively. The USA is seen as a formidable power, one that should be checked by others on the international stage. Cultural symbols based on historical European narratives about the US are called upon to illustrate reckless unilateralism ('Space Cowboy' Reagan) or the future-oriented entrepreneur as a role model for Sweden (during the Clinton years). The final decade under the cultural contestation paradigm is also ambivalent - the role of religion in the USA appears foreign to Swedish eyes, whereas the USA's cultural misunderstandings with others appear familiar.

This chapter compares how Nordic public service media institutions (Finland: YLE; Norway: NRK; Sweden: SVT/SR) de ne and interpret their remits regarding cultural news. Relying on policy documents, interviews with managing cultural news editors and a sample week’s broadcast and online cultural news output, the results show distinctive national di erences in the ways cultural news is conceived, the resources and organisation of the cultural news desks, and di erences in news content during the week studied. e countries are most similar in their broad popular culture o ering, and by that fact that all the companies provide broader cultural news coverage on their websites than in their broadcast versions. However, the distinctions between the online and o ine platforms are less clear than those between the three countries. So, despite the commonalities of the Nordic media model, the values and practices of cultural journalism show enough di erences to warrant further study. 

This article analyses the tensions of the cultural news beat, or what we call cultural journalism. We trace the ways in which transformations such as globalization, digitalization and conglomeration are impacting cultural journalism. We make the overall argument that these structural trends and the tensions they entail challenge cultural journalism's distinctiveness. On the one hand, we see a broadening, diversification and newsification of cultural journalism, making the beat more like other parts of the news organization. On the other hand, traits from cultural journalism, such as analysis, interpretation, and subjectivity as well as a broader sociocultural interest, are seeping into other parts of journalism. Three main research questions guide our approach to pointing out these areas of tension: (1) What are the implications of the broadening of the notion of culture in cultural journalism? (2) What have the changes in the organization of news work and professional roles meant for cultural journalism practitioners? (3) What is the particular epistemology of cultural journalism today? By rereading existing cultural journalism scholarship through the lens of the tensions and paradoxes currently characterizing the subfield, we bring out structural similarities and differences that nuance the crisis narrative, which has influenced much recent literature.

In an era when culture itself has become central to political debates, when boundaries between hard news and soft news, facts and opinion are dissolving, cultural journalism contributes to democratic discourse on vital issues of our time. Cultural journalism is furthermore indicative of journalistic autonomy and specialisation within media organisations, and of the intertwined relationship between the cultural and political public spheres. Nordic cultural journalism in the mainstream media covers more subjects today than ever before, from fine arts to gaming, media industries, and lifestyle issues. At the same time, it harbours debates and reflection on freedom of expression, ethnicity and national identity. This book contributes to an emerging international research agenda on cultural journalism at a time when digitalisation, convergence and globalisation are influencing the character of journalism in multiple ways.

The article reports findings from a pilot study of the discourse on Kosovo in four leading dailies from four countries: Greece, Norway, Sweden and the UK. A combined discourse and propaganda analysis approach is applied to the first three days' coverage of the NATO bombing campaign, with the aim of studying how the various national/local contexts influenced the media discourse's relationship to the propaganda discourse in the conflict. This problematic is relevant for the current discussion on globalization and superpower dominance in connection with transnational war journalism.

Based on theories about the role of cultural mediators in cultural production and using the TV series Mad Men as a case, this article investigates how cultural journalists in the Nordic countries have contributed to legitimizing “quality TV series” as a worthy field of aesthetic consumption. Key analytical points are as follows: (1) cultural journalists legitimize Mad Men’s quality by addressing aspects internal (aesthetic markers) and aspects external (culture industry markers) to the series, as well as the series’ broader social and historical anchoring; (2) Nordic cultural journalists position themselves positively toward the TV series based on their professional expertise and their personal taste preferences and predilections; (3) these legitimation processes take place across journalistic genres, pointing to the importance not only of TV criticism, epitomized by the review, but of cultural journalism more broadly in constructing affirmative attitudes toward popular culture phenomena such as TV series.

Television news narratives are sites where national and transnational identities are cultivatedand mobilised. The question is not whether Swedish, Danish or British news stories about Europe are domesticated to fit national news bulletins, but how events are domesticated and how ‘we’ are made European by the programmes’ producers. The analysis of all European stories between 15-21 November 1999 in three national public servicenews bulletins indicate that viewers are offered different images of Europe during this week, and that journalists play active roles in constructing ‘themes’ which link together different types of news stories into narratives about ‘us’ and ‘them’. From these there emerged a Swedish ‘moralising global villager’, slightly superior but willing to adapt to changing international realities, an anxious and conscientious Danish ‘we’, trying to doits share despite its self-imposed limitations on EU cooperation, and an engaged humanitarian British ‘we’, who is global in scope but prefers to keep a distance from time consuming Euro-squabbles.

The cultural magazine Kobra (2001-2017) was one of the longest running shows in Swedish public service television history. Kobra defined culture broadly as arts, popular culture and subcultures, both international and Swedish. The study uses three lenses-journalistification, transnationality and cultural/societal criticism-to analyze how Kobra evolved over its long run. It focuses on four globally eventful years 2001, 2005, 2011, and 2016 and shows how the shifting SVT mandate is reflected in the show's title sequences, program structure, visual features, and text. Transnationality becomes established through topic themed episodes connecting various cultural domains in different parts of the world or through country/city-themed episodes. A close reading from three different years reveals that Kobra exercised transnational systemic criticism through the choice of theme and interview subjects, rather than through evaluation of cultural expression, in line with its increasing journalistification and public service mandate.

There appears to be a world of difference between NATO’s war over Kosovo in 1999 and the US-led war in Afghanistan 2001. The former was a limited war waged with the active involvement of NATO member countries against an identifiable enemy in well-known terrain, whereas the recent war in Afghanistan seems to lack any of these characteristics. Despite the differences, however, US media management in the first weeks of the war in Afghanistan have been hauntingly familiar for observers of previous conflicts. While mistakes will clearly always be made in times of crisis and war, the US efforts to shape the Information Space outside its own territory demonstrates that certain lessons should and could have been drawn from the Kosovo conflict – if the US is genuinely serious about enlisting the aid of its allies in its struggle with global terrorism.

This article describes how the perceptual aspects of Information Warfare were invoked by NATO and Yugoslavia during the Kosovo conflict in the struggle to influence the attitudes and behaviour of each other, the media and public opinion. NATO’s own evaluation of the lessons learned regarding media management is contrasted to some lessons evidently not learned about shaping the Information Space in this asymmetric conflict situation. In light of these lessons, some indicators of recent US media management efforts are analysed during the first weeks of the war in Afghanistan to determine whether there has been a profound recognition of the need to shape the Information Space.

The nation is one of the most resilient concepts in our understanding of the world and its societies. Politics, sports and cultural events, in news as well as in fiction, are largely structured by the national logic. Internationalism – be it in representation, production or consumption – does not challenge the privileged position of the nation. Globalising processes do offer an alternative to the primacy of the nation, but have so far been unable to overcome its dominance. The nation’s resilience is, in part, due to its continuing relevance: ontologically, it offers a sense of territorial stability and security while epistemologically it can supply a sense of familiarity and order in the global landscape. This volume provides cutting edge analysis of old and new architectures of the nation and its mediated presence in everyday life. In an age of alleged globalisation, nations and nation-states have been claimed to be out-dated. However, the proclamation of the end of the nation (-state) has been premature. Eschewing fashionable obituaries for media, geography and the nation, leading media scholars explore the complex ideological and spatial changes in contemporary understandings of the nation. The nation can be seen as a nodal point of media discourse. Hence the power, the politics and the poetics of the nation will be the subject of this book.

This study explores the notion that national television news covers foreign conflicts in ways that reflect a country's foreign policy orientation and its stance towards that particular conflict. Sweden and Britain were chosen for comparison since both are European countries with similar public service broadcasting systems, but with different foreign policy orientations and positions in the international system. Four cases were chosen to determine empirically how and to what extent aspects of these foreign policy orientations were relevant for foreign conflict news images.

The theorefical frarnework sketched three types of factors which could contribute to the image of foreign conflicts in national television news: the foreign policy orientation (societal/political factors), an international media culture (media factors) and a national journalist culture (media norms in a societal context). Both quantitative and qualitative content analyses were used to test if Swedish Rapport and British 9 O´Clock News differed along four dimensions: whether they set conflicts in a superpower or regional context, whether they focused on the military or civilian aspects of the conflict, whether they gave more attention to Great Power actors or international/regional organisations, and whether they evaluated the contenders differently.

The results indicate that Rapport and the 9 O´Clock News differed most in the quantity and intensity of attention to these four conflicts, This was taken to mean that journalists' notions of proximity/relevance coincided with the foreign policy relevance of these conflicts. Secondly, Rapport gave consistently more attention to the regional contexts of conflicts, to the negative aspects of the civilian reaction and situation, and the aggressor was depicted in a more negative light in all four conflicts. The 9 O'Clock News tended to include more details of the military hostilities and there was a more cautious evaluation of the aggressor than in Rapport. The four cases show that the greater the foreign policy involvement of the country, the greater the number of foreign policy aspects were employed by television news to make sense of the conflicts.

The results also supported previous research emphasising international similarities in the overall narrative structure of the news. These similarities were attributed to journalistic genres for reporting armed conflict. One possible explanation for different national perspectives on these conflicts is that societal norms get "translated" into media norms. Future research should thus look more closely at the interaction between societal and media factors-different national journalist cultures, in order to fully understand the way foreign conflicts are "nationalised".

This article investigates the way Swedish cultural journalists from press, radio and television perceive the core and boundaries of their sub-field at a time when digitalisation and “journalistification” blur them even more. It draws on 27 in-depth interviews with cultural journalists that have worked in the field since the 1980s. What is defined as cultural journalism has expanded since the inclusion of popular culture in its mandate in the early 1990s. Despite this, cultural journalists at different media share similar understandings of their remit, even if self-identification with current practices varies somewhat by generation. The study shows how cultural journalists defend and negotiate the boundaries towards debate and opinion, and news and entertainment journalism. Cultural journalists experience pressure by management to be relevant, newsworthy and “clickable”. Especially press respondents felt that cultural debates have become increasingly indistinguishable from societal debates, due to their visibility in the digital flow. How cultural journalists negotiate boundaries with entertainment and news desks varies somewhat depending on the media organisation. Boundary challenges appear through new genres related to liveness, personality-orientation and societal debate, all of which may conflict with the central task of cultural journalism—to provide in-depth reflection and expertise-based analysis.

Have the changes taking place in the Baltic Sea Region since 1989 altered Cold War frameworks, Orientalist stereotypes, and sporadic news of threats and crises from the East? The studies in this volume demonstrate a startling continuity in the depiction of our eastern Baltic neighbors as fundamentally different from us, as backward or as harbingers of potential threats. The authors demonstrate that journalism is still closely tied to national perspectives of the world, which in turn is related to a broader Western discourse about the Other. Some authors locate identity through journalism's ritualistic dimensions — providing a sense of safety and security as well as warnings of risk and threats - whereas others find it in taken-for-granted strategies of Othering. This is not the whole story, however, for the authors demonstrate that globalization is changing the national context on which journalism is based, thus local news of the Baltic Sea region differs significantly from national news, and EU journalism blurs the boundaries between the national we and its Others. This volume describes, analyzes and compares the manner in which identity is constructed in Swedish, Danish, Finnish and German news about events, people and issues in the eastern Baltic Sea Region at the beginning and the end of the 20th century.

This article discusses the ways television news media reinforce national perspectives incoverage of events outside their borders, and the potential consequences of this formainstream television news. International news, as it is seen on national television, isstill a rigid genre where people and events tend to be viewed either through nationalprisms or through generic characteristics common in hegemonic Anglo-American newssources. Globalization, in terms of the concentration of media ownership, and changingtelevision formats have done remarkably little to change agendas and narratives innational television news. Shifting geopolitical realities, the accessibility of different newssources, and the self-reflexivity of journalists due to changing industry demands shouldmake more of an impact on international news narratives. Some studies point to theexistence of narratives portraying other types of relationships than the national “we” andthe foreign “other,” but systematic studies are needed to see whether such stories haveincreased over time.

This article addresses the usefulness of the concepts public sphere, counterpublics, and cultural citizenship for understanding some of the most popular noncommercial Lebanese, Egyptian, and Kuwaiti bloggers in the period 2009–2010. It compares the political and media landscapes, drawing on semi-structured interviews and the most common blogging themes in these three contexts. While the notion of counterpublics was found useful for understanding some types of blogging community, cultural citizenship stands out as a more flexible, process-oriented concept capturing how bloggers acculturate information and entertainment as sources of empowerment, resistance, and community belonging. The popular bloggers can be characterized as having consumerist, civil society, or formal politics trajectories, each challenging traditional power structures in ways that can be traced to specific national contexts.

The term politainment refers to the intertwining of politics and entertainment, and encompasses two processes: (1) political entertainment—how the entertainment industry exploits political topics in various entertainment formats; and (2) entertaining politics—how political actors capitalize on their celebrity (staging photo-ops, party convention spectacle, talk-show appearances, etc.) in order to enhance their images and to promote certain issues. When broadly defined, politainment moves beyond its association with infotainment to consider popular culture as a potential space for political insight and activity, and to acknowledge entertainment formats as sources of political knowledge, value orientation, and civic engagement. As a growing body of international scholarship attests, new hybrid media formats increasingly engage “political reality” across genres, conventional and new, in new television formats such as political satire and reality TV, fictionalized realism (in film, television, telenovelas, and interactive video games), and new variations of the celebrity media event genre. Such research recognizes that pleasures found in popular cultural formats of everyday life can also be ways of cultivating audiences' conscious motivations for political participation.

The Indian Ocean tsunami was one of the most devastating natural disasters of the modern age affecting hundreds of thousands of people from 40 countries. Some scholars saw the unprecedented “real time” news coverage and international outpouring of aid donations as examples of a cosmopolitan consciousness, while others maintain that in crisis the media look to our national leaders and institutions to act. The tsunami has also been described as a turning point for experienced television journalists, who in lieu of traditional notions of objectivity took on the role of crisis managers, and actively turned to the Internet as a means of helping people. From the vantage points of international communication, media globalization, and crisis journalism, this book addresses the links between national and transnational mediated spaces, crisis management, journalistic roles and ethics, and the mediation of distant suffering. Focusing on national and transnational news channels, it includes quantitative and qualitative text analyses, rhetorical analysis, journalist interviews, and focus group material.

Cultural and entertainment journalism deals with aesthetic experiences, advice on cultural consumption, as well as reflection and debate on ethical and moral humanistic issues. Does this sub-field of journalism systematically represent immigrants and integration differently than the other news and commentary articles? Comparing immigration discourse in a representative sample of six Scandinavian newspapers between 1970 and 2016 using content analysis we find that cultural journalism, while clearly reverbing with the dominant national issues at the time, did provide alternative perspectives. It not only brought up themes like racism, multiculturalism, national identity and religion more often, but was also more positive, more gender-balanced and more often gave a voice to immigrants than other news did. A closer qualitative reading further suggests a typology of ten main story-types, varying relatively little over time and across national borders. Cultural journalism in this case illustrates how the cultural public sphere can positively contribute to the debate of complicated issues in the public sphere by offering resources for identification, empathy and arguments for specific points of view.

No analysis of modern warfare can be complete without an assessment of the role of the media. The rapid development of communications technologies during the 1990s linking different parts of the world closer together and bypassing the remit of nation states are examples of globalization. The media contribute to globalization through their roles in the changing global infrastructure, as channels of communication, and as messengers about the world that lies beyond our direct experience. The media occupy a unique position in society: they constitute an arena for different communicators, yet they are also actors in the very events being communicated.

Media debates after the invasion of Iraq suggested that there was a growing anti-Americanism in Europe and that this contributed to an increasing sense of European identity as representing values that differed from that of the USA. But what if this anti-Americanism was really anti-Bushism, and how shared are the shared values on the European side when it comes to representation of the USA as Other? The articles in this Special Issue focus on the discursive image of the USA in the elite media of five European countries at points in time from a particularly frosty Cold War period under President Reagan until six months after the installation of President Obama. Taken together, there are broad similarities in the paradigms and characteristics used to depict the USA from the post-Cold War period, especially in French, Finnish, Swedish and German media. Below the surface, however, the narratives reveal that each country's commentators are mainly interested in the USA in relation to domestic concerns or as a prism for its relationships with other countries on the world stage. There is a stark focus on the US presidents as symbols through which the USA as a whole is seen. Both Democratic and Republican presidents are likened to Rambo, the 'space cowboy', the 'trade and cultural warrior', or Hollywood 'stars', which could be interpreted as a measure of cultural disdain towards American popular culture and militarism.

Can Arab blogging, whether in English or in Arabic, be considered emerging counter-public spheres in the Arab world? And what is the impact of blogging in different Arabic mediascapes: do they broaden the boundaries for freedom of expression on political and social issues, do they test cultural/religious norms and are women empowered to exercise agency through participation? This article addresses questions such as these with respect to the Lebanese blogosphere.

This chapter traces the historical development of Swedish cultural journalism as a distinctive contributor to societal debate and aesthetic discourse in the mainstream media. How did Swedish cultural journalism come to have this dual focus on politics and artistic expression, and where does it stand in relation to today’s digital media landscape? The chapter deals with the hybrity of this sub-field of journalism, the meta-debates about its professionalisation and commercialisation, key cultural editors that staked out a space for cultural journalism in their newspapers and how the public service media gradually took on their own cultural journalistic roles in relation to the press.

Cultural journalism is a subfield of journalism that encompasses what is known as arts journalism. While arts journalism is characterized by reviews, critique, news, and essays about the arts and popular culture, cultural journalism has a broader take on culture, including lifestyle issues, societal debate, and reflective ethical discussion by cultural personas or expressed in a literary style. Both arts and cultural journalists see their work as “journalism with a difference,” evoking different perspectives and worldviews from those dominating mainstream news reporting. At the same time, cultural journalism shares with journalism issues like boundary work, genre blurring, digitalization, globalization, professionalization, and “the crisis of journalism.” There are three main ways cultural journalism has been studied: one research strand defines cultural journalism as material produced by the cultural desks or material that is explicitly labelled cultural journalism; another defines it as journalism about culture, regardless of how it is labelled or produced; and a third strand includes only arts journalism, examining journalistic content on the fine arts and popular culture. Studies from all of these approaches are included in this article due to the effort to include a wide variety of countries at different time periods and an effort to track joint defining features and developments in cultural journalism. The emphasis is on the Nordic context, where the term “cultural journalism” is well established and where research is relatively comprehensive. The research is divided into three themes: the cultural public sphere and the contribution to democracy; cultural journalism’s professionalism and the challenges of digitalization; and transnational and global aspects of cultural journalism, including tendencies such as cultural homogenization and hybridization.

International research on cultural journalism as a subfield has been complicated by its varying designations (arts journalism, feuilleton, journalism about culture, entertainment), and its numerous aesthetic forms, disciplines, or types of culture, all of which are changing over time. Despite these issues, research points in the same direction: the amount of cultural journalism is increasing, and the boundaries against other types of journalism are becoming more porous. There is also a decline in editorial autonomy. In common with journalism, there is an increase in generalists working with culture and greater central managerial control in new multiplatform media organizations. The research points to an increase in a more transnationally oriented cultural journalism, mainly through a larger share of cultural news and popular culture—while its core, review and critique, has changed in character, or arguably lost ground. The increasing “newsification” of cultural journalism should prompt future research on whether the “watchdog” role vis-à-vis the cultural industries is growing. New forms of art and culture are beginning to get coverage, but also, in some cases, the intermixing of “lifestyle” with cultural journalism. The commercialization and celebrity aspects of this are clear, but new digital platforms have also enabled new voices and different formats of cultural journalism and a wider dissemination and intensity in cultural debates, all of which emphasize its democratic potential. New research on this subject appears to focus on the longitudinal changes in cultural journalism, the implications of digitalization and globalization, and cultural journalism in broadcasting.

Hur ser världen ut när den betraktas genom ett kulturellt filter? Hur bidrar kulturjournalistiken till förståelsen av brännande samtidshändelser och samhällsfrågor? Är kulturjournalisternas oro för kritikens överlevnad i det digitala medielandskapet befogad?

I denna bok undersöker tre medieforskare kulturjournalistikens utveckling sedan 1980-talet med särskilt fokus på omvärldsbilder och politiska dimensioner. Författarna kartlägger innehåll i tidningar, radio och tv och intervjuar kulturjournalister. De diskuterar de sociala mediernas betydelse och belyser svenskarnas intresse för kulturjournalistik.

Det visar sig att kulturjournalistiken har ett unikt anslag jämfört med traditionell nyhetsjournalistik och politisk opinionsbildning. Den rör sig gärna bortom nationalstatliga förståelseramar och är debattdrivande på ett särpräglat sätt. Laddade kulturdebatter om #metoo, terrorism och identitetspolitik breder ut sig och lockar till klick. Samtidigt har recensionsgenren fortfarande en given roll i utbudet, även om den befinner sig i klicklandskapets utkanter.

Boken ger en unik inblick i en sällan belyst del av det svenska medielandskapet, och tillför ny kunskap om kulturjournalistikens särskilda stildrag samt de roller den spelar i samhället och demokratin.

This article explores how nine Swedish cultural editors and managers in mainstream media institutions define cultural journalism and its political dimensions during times of increased digitization and media convergence. Swedish cultural journalism is aesthetic and political critique applied to subject areas (music, literature, etc.) and contemporary societal and ethical issues. Drawing on Zelizer we ask whether there is a common interpretive community of cultural journalists in different media regarding: (1) how they define their scope, (2) how they understand “the political” in cultural journalism and its implications for democracy, and (3) how they view media convergence and digitalization. We find that although editors/managers from different media share a basic understanding of cultural journalism as an alternative perspective to news, “the political” in cultural journalism is approached differently in the press and the public service broadcast media. Furthermore, due in part to structural conditions, they also see the effects of digitization differently, forming sub-communities on two counts. This study thus contributes new knowledge to a field previously focused almost exclusively on newspapers.

Although terrorist attacks in Europe have increasingly been carried out on cultural targets such as media institutions, concert halls and leisure venues, most research on media and terrorism draws conclusions based on traditional hard news stories rather than on journalism specialising in cultural issues. This study explores the distinctiveness of Swedish cultural journalism by comparing it to news journalism, using the 2015 terror attacks in Paris as a case study. Our content analysis reveals that whereas news journalism is mainly descriptive, focusing on the short-term consequences of terrorism, security frames and political elites and eyewitnesses as sources, cultural journalism is more interpretive, giving a voice first and foremost to cultural elites. The cultural filter put on this event means a focus on the longer term implications of terrorism and instead of engaging in the hunt for the perpetrators, there is greater emphasis on the societal dilemmas that terrorism accentuates, especially the democratic values that are at stake. However, our results also show that the ongoing journalistification of cultural journalism, as defined by a stronger prevalence of descriptive style, blurs the lines between news and cultural journalism.

I detta kapitel går vi igenom forskning på kulturjournalistikens område; undersökningar av kulturjournalistiken i stort såväl som studier av enskilda delområden som musikkritik och konstrecensioner. Vi börjar med en genomgång av teoribildningar på området, med särskilt fokus på fältteori, teorier om (de)professionalisering, offentlighetsteori och globaliseringsteori. Vi fortsätter sedan med en redogörelse för den inter- nationella forskningen, med fokus på europa och de övriga nordiska länderna där flest studier genomförts, och landar i en diskussion av forskningen om svensk kulturjournalistik. Majoriteten av studierna är som vi kommer att visa koncentrerade kring tidningsjournalistik. Med utgångspunkt i detta och med hänsyn till senare tids allmänna utveckling inom journalistiken belyser vi slutligen behovet av forskning som tar avstamp i multimediala sammanhang. 

Sedan tidigt åttiotal, när Sven-Olov Wallenstein slog ner i Stockholms intellektuella liv, har han vuxit till en kraftfull och mångförgrenad institution i sig, under sitt kärnfulla emblem: Walle. Med avstamp i filosofin och idéhistorien har han gripit in i den estetiska debatten som ingen annan under dessa gångna fyra decennier. Genom egna böcker och genom översättningar, genom tidskrifter, recensioner, katalogtexter, och inte minst genom sin undervisning runtom i Sverige och Norden har han på djupet påverkat diskussionen inom konst, arkitektur, men även inom litteratur, dans, musik och film. Som uttolkare och översättare av den klassiska tyska filosofin – Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger och Adorno – liksom av dess moderna franska arvtagare – Derrida, Foucault och Deleuze – har han på ett avgörande sätt bidragit till att återknyta det band mellan svensk och europeisk idékultur som den föregående generationens ofta historielösa omfamning av angloamerikansk analytisk filosofi hade klippt av.

För att fira Walle har vi satt ihop en bok. Det har inte blivit en pliktbok, ingen sedvanlig samling lärda uppsatser som följer vänbokens konventioner. Istället för en festskrift, fick det bli en skriftfest, en bild- och uttrycks-fest, där skrivande och skapandet självt firas. Walle har arbetat hårdare än de flesta, men till sist var det alltid festen som var målet, releasen, partyt, skrattet och galenskapen. Vad vore en filosof som inte skrattar? Inte en Walle, inte den som förmår förvandla tunga resonemang till klara linjer, komplexa relationer till glad geometri, och mångfaldiga ord till färgstarka, träffande och koncentrerade bilder.