The 1910s was a dynamic period in Swedish journalism when reporters became professionals and the largest newspapers engaged their own foreign correspondents. A prominent correspondent of the time was Gustaf Hellström, also a famous writer. His reports from France during the First World War, collected in the book 1 1/2 mil härifrån står världens största slag, are known for their dedicated attitude. An assumption in this essay is that such an attitude corresponds to a narrative commitment, which could be divided into narrative empathy and narrative compassion.
Using tools from discourse narratology and cognitive narratology, I investigate narrative techniques and strategies at work when a narrative commitment is constructed in the reportages from France. A conclusion is that parallel perspectives and a multitude of voices within the narrative construction connect the individual to the general and convey empathy with all victims of the war, civilians as well as soldiers on both sides.
In a final section, I place Hellström’s series of reportages from France within a broader context where I highlight similarites with Stig Dagerman’s series of reportages Tysk höst from 1946 and Svetlana Alexievich’s documentary books from the 1980s and onwards.
The Alienated Form of Nature: The Critique of Imitation and Aesthetic Knowing in the young Goethe's Aesthetic Writings
This essay examines the transformation of the concept of mimesis (imitation, Nachahmung der Natur) in the theoretical writings of the young Johann Wolfgang Goethe and its implications for the conception of aesthetic knowing. The Sturm und Drang period in general and Goethe, the period's most influential writer, in particular are usually regarded as skeptical about or even hostile to the classicist ideal of imitation. In this essay I argue that Goethe's conception of mimesis is closely related to his idea that nature is not immediately represented in art. Imitation of nature is the result of a process of alienation, which transforms nature into an aesthetic object. It is only in this transformed state, as "inner form" (innere Form), that nature is available to man. Furthermore, this notion of imitation as alienation points to the profound change that epitomizes epistemology in the late eighteenth century, that is, the transition from the classical episteme of representation to the modern, organic episteme.