LIT1302 Western literature from 1700 to 1900, seminar (Autumn 2014, Spring 2015, Autumn 2015, Spring 2016, Autumn 2016)
LIT4300A / LIT4300B Literary theory: Borders, liminality, literature (Autumn 2014)
LIT3000 Specialization with bachelor paper: Fantastic literature and science fiction (Spring 2015)
EXFAC03-LIT / EXFAC03-EST Text and interpretation / Art and interpretation, Examen facultatum, lectures (Autumn 2015, Autumn 2016)
LIT4360A / LIT4360B Literary texts: Immigration Literature (Spring 2016)
LIT3000 Specialization with bachelor paper: The Literary Arctic (with Janicke S. Kaasa, Autumn 2016)
Background
1963 born Stockholm
-1981 schools in England, Botswana, Zambia og Norway
1990 Magister degree in Comparative Literature, University of Oslo
1993 School of Criticism & Theory, Dartmouth College, USA
1994 visiting researcher at University of Wales Aberystwyth
1995, 1997 stand-in Associate Professor, University of Oslo
1997 Dr. art. degree, University of Oslo
1998-2014 Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Tromsø/UiT The Arctic University of Tromsø
2006 Visiting Professor of Border Studies, Centre for Border Studies, University of Glamorgan/Prifysgol Morganwg
2011 visiting researcher at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis
2013 visiting researcher at Sogn og Fjordane University College
2014-2016 Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature, UiT The Arctic University of Tromsø
2014- Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Oslo
2016- Adjunct Professor of Cultural Encounters, University of Eastern Finland
2017 visiting researcher at the University of Vienna
2017-2020 Head of Research, Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS), University of Oslo
Appointments
Research leader and co-coordinator, UiT The Arctic University of Tromsø's participation in EUBORDERSCAPES (EU Frame Programme 7, University of Eastern Finland 2012-2016)
Co-coordinator Arctic Modernities, UiT The Arctic University of Tromsø (Research Council of Norway, POLARPROG programme, 2013-2016)
Co-leader TRAUM - Transforming Author Museums, Sogn og Fjordane University College in cooperation with the University of Oslo (Research Council of Norway, FRIPRO-programme, 2016-2019)
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Reading the Future North, In Janike Kampevold Larsen & Peter Hemmersam (ed.),
Future North : The Changing Arctic Landscapes.
Routledge.
ISBN 9781472481252.
2.
s 16
- 25
Görling, Reinhold & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Sovereignty, In Johan Henrik Schimanski & Stephen Wolfe (ed.),
Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections.
Berghahn Books.
ISBN 9781785334641.
Kapittel 5.
s 111
- 128
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Glass Borders: Visibility and Invisibility in Maria Amelie’s Deportation Memoir Takk (2014). antiAtlas Journal.
ISSN 2495-7100.
(2)
Show summary
The deportation of unregistered migrant Maria Amelie after the publication of her book Ulovlig norsk (2010) was a major media event in Norway. In her following book, Takk (2014), she constantly refers to windows, mirrors and camera lenses. Glass becomes a symbol of traumatic experience and configures the in/visibility of the deportation borderscape, creating a political aesthetics of the border.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Reading from the Border, In Jakob Lothe (ed.),
The Future of Literary Studies.
Novus Forlag.
ISBN 978-82-7099-900-2.
Kapittel.
s 61
- 71
Full text in Research Archive.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Wolfe, Stephen (2017). Intersections: A Conclusion in the Form of a Glossary, In Johan Henrik Schimanski & Stephen Wolfe (ed.),
Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections.
Berghahn Books.
ISBN 9781785334641.
Conclusion/Glossary.
s 155
- 177
Full text in Research Archive.
Orientations revealed as false presumably lead to the need for reorientation. Outside this economy, can there be utopian unorientation or ambiguous post-orientation? The self comes into being in a moment of disorientation, as Althusser's famous scene of being hailed by a policeman on the street makes clear. Althusser represses this moment, but what if we allow for its accompanying self-reflexivity? The fictional cities of China Miéville's The City & the City (2009) are set in a fragmented and multi-layered space characterised by displacement and disorientation. This theoretically informed police procedural emphasises disorientation through the form of the detective story and plays with genre orientations through its fantastic/science fictional elements. Most strikingly, it reifies our everyday practices of ignoring certain things around us, using a science fictional novum: the institutionalised practice of ‘unseeing’. The novel suggests that the seeing that paradoxically lurks behind unseeing creates disorientation, giving momentary glimpses of ambiguous post-orientations.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). XÉNITEIA/Utlendighet, I: Knut Stene-Johansen; Christian Refsum & Johan Henrik Schimanski (red.),
Å leve sammen. Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet.
Spartacus.
ISBN 978-82-304-01781.
Kapittel.
s 402
- 416
The borderscape is a flexible entity that goes beyond the space of the border and the borderland. This article argues that art and literature can be constitutive elements in the borderscape, along with other kinds of bordering and demarcation. Art and literature can help create resistance through performative acts of “borderscaping”, taking place in different locations and involving different perspectives. The article uses definitions of the aesthetic to trace forms of “distance” or “distancing” as they appear in conceptualizations of the borderscape, through the aesthetic categories of the sublime, the postmodern and the defamiliarized. Artistic practices in the Norwegian-Russian borderscape are examined in an evaluation of their geopolitical significance, with particular attention given to descriptions of the Norwegian-Russian border in novels by John Fowles and Kjartan Fløgstad.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). Reading Borders and Reading as Crossing Borders, In Inga Brandell; Marie Carlsson & Önver Cetrez (ed.),
Borders and the Changing Boundaries of Knowledge.
Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul.
ISBN 978-91-978813-3-3.
[Kapittel 5].
s 91
- 107
Show summary
Borders are traces, that is to say, they are a form of writing – and thus they are also texts to be read. We often think of that which is on the other side of the border as something unknown, and the border itself also in some sense unknowable, inviting interpretation. I will here be examining some literary and cinematic narratives in which national borders are crossed for elements of an epistemology of the border. Such narratives often transform crossings into readings, suggesting that these crossings are allegories of the reading of the narrative itself – the reader crossing over into the text. If border crossings are movements of bodies in space, what do these narratives tell us of the relationship between the reader’s body and the space of the text? What can these narratives tell us about the figurality of community and identity? Can national affiliation be seen as an act of reading borders? I suggest that narratives of border crossing, like border crossings themselves, are structured around a double vector, sometimes transformed into a swirling confusion of directions, constituting the border zone and its associated identities.
What is the discursive genealogy of an ecological approach to the Arctic? Building on distinctions suggested by Francis Spufford and Gísli Pálsson, this article examines a specific juncture in the history of European–Arctic interaction – the reception of the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition in 1874 – and traces the potential for ecological and relational understandings in what seems to be an orientalist and exploitative material. Examining the medial reception in Austria and in Norway, along with certain key texts in which Arctic wildlife is described, we find that the Norwegian reception of the expedition emphasizes practical issues connected with resource exploitation in the Arctic, while the Austrian reception mostly sees the Arctic as a symbolic resource with which to negotiate issues of identity and modernity. The Austrian discourse revolves around a set of paradoxical contradictions, the most central being those between materialism and idealism and emptiness and fullness; we argue it is the instability of such ambiguities which produces the possibility of a future ecological discourse.
Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.
Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (red.) (2016). Å leve sammen. Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet.
Spartacus.
ISBN 978-82-304-01781.
444 s.
Die österreichisch-ungarische Nordpolexpedition (1872-1874) entdeckte nicht nur das Franz-Joseph-Land, sie setzte auch kurzfristig Österreich-Ungarn als Staat mit polaren Interessen auf die europäische Karte des späten 19. Jahrhun- derts. Die Rückkehr der Polarfahrer von Vardø in Norwegen über Hamburg nach Wien im September 1874 war von einer umfassenden europaweiten medialen Aufmerksamkeit begleitet. Insbesondere in Wien sollte in den folgenden Wochen die Expedition zu einem Mikrokosmos der Monarchie stilisiert und zum Mittelpunkt aktueller sozialer, politischer und kultureller Diskurse werden. Die vorliegende Monographie ist die erste ausführliche kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeit über die Expedition. Sie unterscheidet sich von vorangegangen Arbeiten durch ihren Fokus auf den Empfang sowie die europäische Rezeption der Expedition.
Buset, Pål; Riley, Jon Erik; Mathisen, Werner Christie; Herrman, Bjørn Alex; Auklend, Morten; Haug, Hallvard & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Vår fagre nye verden: To gamle framtidsskildringer minner mistenkelig om vår samtid. Kan science fiction påvirke historiens gang?. Vårt land.
ISSN 0805-5424.
s 17- 19
BOOK LAUNCH AT NORDNORSK KUNSTMUSEUM Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe, eds. Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections. New York: Berghahn, 2017. Welcoming remarks by JÉRÉMIE MICHAEL MCGOWAN (Director of the Nordnorsk kunstmuseum) and LINDA NESBY (Scandinavian literature, UiT) Talk by JOPI NYMAN (Professor of English Literature, University of Eastern Finland): “Borders and Narratives of Im/Mobility” Short presentations of the Border Aesthetics project and book by Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe
Johannes Anyuru’s 2012 novel En Storm kom från paradiset (A Storm Blew in From Paradise/ Ein Sturm wehte vom Paradiese her) describes the labyrinthical journey from Uganda to Sweden undertaken by the author’s father. Using this biographical fiction as a departure point, I will be examining how a short scenic description placed at the very beginning of the novel encapsulates a whole border landscape or borderscape. The scene can be analyzed as a border crossing on different scales (Tanzania-Kenya, Uganda-Sweden, Africa-Europe) and surfaces (topographical, symbolic, epistemological, temporal and textual), using the methods of border poetics. The analysis can then be used to isolate a series of central rhetorical and narrative figurations of the border. These analyses around a single example shed light on the ongoing border turn in literary and cultural studies, and how humanities-orientated border theory and social science-orientated border studies can learn from each other. Border figurations in fiction and in autobiographical narratives about migration and cultural crossings are keys to understanding how different conceptions of the border enter into exchange across discourses. My reading of Anyuru’s text takes place against the background of research on border figurations in selected migration narratives published in Norwegian (Nasim Karim, Romeo Gill, Roda Ahmed, Maria Amelie, Amal Aden og Sara Azmeh Rasmussen) together with novels by Swedish authors such as Johannes Anyuru og Jonas Hassan Khemiri. The specific figurations shed light on the role of literacy and Bildung in the journeys of both migrants and readers.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Border Ob-scene, Border Non-Scene, Border Scene.
Post-traumatic conditions are the result of the wounding of bodily or psychic borders. As trauma studies has shown, they are framed and often propogated culturally. Crossing territorial borders can cause traumas: the crossing of the border by migrants and others often involves the crossing of their own bodily or psychic borders. This article will examine autobiographies and novels published in Swedish and Norwegian for the way in which they figure the traumatic effects of migrant border crossings. It will apply a border aesthetics approach, bringing the status of aesthetic narratives as political borderings of the sensible (cf. Rancière’s concept of the “partage de sensible”) together with the bordering of the sensible which takes place in the fixations, substitutions and blindspots of trauma. It will argue that published narratives of migrant border-crossing introduce a longer, despectacularizing temporality to the traumas they involve, necessitating investigation of cultural memory in diasporic and multi-generational contexts. Taking as its departure point the use of photography and photographs in Roda Ahmed’s Norwegian tale of coming of age in the Somali diaspora, Forberedelsen (2008; The Preparation), Johannes Anyuru’s Swedish lyrical retelling of a father’s story of migration from Uganda in En Storm kom från paradiset (2013; A Storm Blew in From Paradise, 2015), and Jonas Hasan Khemiri’s complex metafiction about a Tunisian father in Montecore: En unik tiger (2006; Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, 2011), the lecture argues that these constitute both umbilical border objects and traumatic borderings of the in/visible and the non-visible. Reference is made to theories of the temporalities of photography and trauma, asking how the novels make their way around the neurotic fixity of the traumatic image as a symptom of the unnarratable, along with related affective states such as nostalgia, melancholy and hysteria. Inspired by the allusion in Anyuru’s title, the use of photographs in these novels is compared to Walter Benjamin’s traumatized use of images in “Theses on a Philosophy of History” (1968 [1950]).
Current political narratives of ‘no borders’ and a ‘big, beautiful wall’ present us with opposed visions (an ‘axiology’) of future border regimes, utopian or dystopian according to the context. How do literary narratives of migration configure the risks and appeals of different future conceptions of bordering? If utopias are, as has been argued, bordered places or enclaves, how can they cater for the mobilities involved in migration? Besides examples of how utopian borders are evoked in fables and poems of migration and utopia (Ahmed, Le Guin, Bachmann) and in science fiction novels (Le Guin), a reading is given of Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel Exit West (2017) as an contemporary example of a global migrant utopia involving utopian borders in a science-fictional fashion. The argument connects theories of utopia/dystopia (Jameson) and borders in national identity theory (Anderson, Bhabha), as well as the concept of the science fictional ‘novum’ (Suvin), in order to in argue that literature can provide a corrective balance to the current spectacularizing discourse of a ‘migration crisis’.
Current political narratives of ‘no borders’ and a ‘big, beautiful wall’ present us with opposed visions (an ‘axiology’) of future border regimes, utopian or dystopian according to the context. How do literary narratives of migration configure the risks and appeals of different future conceptions of bordering? If utopias are, as has been argued, bordered places or enclaves, how can they cater for the mobilities involved in migration? Besides examples of how utopian borders are evoked in fables and poems of migration and utopia (Ahmed, Le Guin, Bachmann) and in science fiction novels (Le Guin), a reading is given of Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel Exit West (2017) as an contemporary example of a global migrant utopia involving utopian borders in a science-fictional fashion. The argument connects theories of utopia/dystopia (Jameson) and borders in national identity theory (Anderson, Bhabha), as well as the concept of the science fictional ‘novum’ (Suvin), in order to in argue that literature can provide a corrective balance to the current spectacularizing discourse of a ‘migration crisis’.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Grenzen, Arktis, Schriftstellermuseen.
UEF’s long-standing and internationally recognised research expertise in the field of border studies attracts many leading scholars to the university, also from outside Finland's borders. One of them is Professor of Comparative Literature Johan Schimanski from the University of Oslo.
Using the same text as the lecture, Johannes Anyuru’s 2012 novel En Storm kom från paradiset (A Storm Blew in From Paradise/Ein Sturm wehte vom Paradiese her), as its departure point, the seminar will explore the traumatic aspects of bordering and border-crossing and investigate conceptions of trauma and memory as borders. Processes of trauma (the piercing and thus crossing of physical or psychical borders to the self) and traumatization (the inability to cross epistemological boundaries to the traumatic event) bear formal similarities to border-crossing narratives, especially where the status of the event of trauma/border-crossing and repetition/dissemination over time are concerned. Moreover, recent work on ‘in/visibility’ (and ‘in/audibility’) in migrant borderscapes, inspired by Arendt and Rancière, suggest that border trauma will have a central role to play figuring the ‘sense-ability’ of various others in many narratives, parallell with other figurations such as border spectacle and border surveillance. In interpreting the novel, emphasis will be placed on the interplay of narrative (the audible) and image (the visible) in the tracing of trauma, inspired by Unni Langås’ readings of photography, phototextuality and ekphrasis in trauma literature.
Internetfortællingen 'Homestuck' er blevet kaldt både grænsesprængende og eksperimenterende - og så er den helt utrolig lang. Det sidste har blandt ført til sammenligninger med Homers berømte historie om Odysseus. Vi har set nærmere på fænomenet.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Arctic Literature – Creating the Arctic Story.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Arktisk science fiction.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Border Figurations in Migration Literature.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Crossing the Borders between Languages: Narrative Uses of Multilingualism in Swedish and Norwegian Migration Literature.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Crossing the Borders between Languages: Narrative Uses of Multilingualism in Swedish and Norwegian Migration Literature.
Show summary
Jonas Hassan Khemiri’s 2003 breakthrough as a novelist, Ett öga rött, was admired for its use of creolized Swedish dialect used by suburban youth with various migrant backgrounds. In his metafictional second novel, Montecore: En unik tiger, the author-narrator receives e-mails from a friend of his Tunisian father written in rhetorically colourful, grammatically incorrect Swedish. In Johannes Anyuru’s En storm kom från paradiset, multilingualism is a central motif in the story of his father’s convoluted journey from Uganda to Sweden, rather than a stylistic strategy. While novelistic discourse in creolized suburban youth dialect also exists in Norwegian (Maria Navarro Skaranger’s Alle utlendinger har lukka gardiner), most novels and fictionalized autobiographies by second and 1.5 generation migrants in Norway isolate multilingualism in the textual discourse to highly symbolic uses expressing cultural difference. However, in these texts multilingualism both appears as a motif and underlies the wider performative act of border-crossing culminating in writing texts in Norwegian. Using examples from this material, I will be using theoretical developments in transdisciplinary border studies to argue that multilingualism, code-switching, creolization, language-learning, translation and ”rudimentariness” (Mireille Rosello) as motifs and as discursive strategies in migration literature can be positioned as figurations of extended and labyrinthal border crossings on the entangled planes – topographical, epistemological, temporal, symbolic and textual – of the various ”borderscapes” (Chiara Brambilla and others) involved. I will be asking why different texts chose to limit multilingualism to the level of story, or to isolated cases of code-switching, while others use it as a stylistic strategy on the level of textual discourse; seeking reasons not only in personal histories and authorial creativity, but also in the ways in which migration literature is ascribed value in specific contexts.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Figuration in Migration Narratives: Despectacularizing the Border Crisis.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Forbudt kjærlighet. Grenseoverskridelser i Romeo Gill og Roda Ahmed.
Professor Johan Schimanski fra Universitetet i Oslo holder foredrag om grensens betydning og hvordan humanioras border theory og samfunnsvitenskapens border studies kan lære av hverandre. Han tar utgangspunkt i den svenske forfatteren Johannes Anyurus roman En storm kom från paradiset (2012). Romanen handler om en labyrintisk reise fra Uganda til Sverige, med grensepasseringer i flere dimensjoner og på flere nivåer. Med utgangspunkt i såkalt grensepoetikk, isoleres retoriske og narrative framstillinger av grensen. Schimanski berører også norske eksempler som Nasim Karim, Romeo Gill, Roda Ahmed, Marie Amalie, Amal Aden og Sara Azmeh Rasmussen. Ut fra disse inviterer han til samtale om rollen til literacy i forståelsen av migrasjonsreiser og leserreiser.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Innlegg på sluttpanel, "Är litteraturvetenskapen gränsöverskridande?".
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Reading and Writing: Working inside/outside the Literary Field.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Seasons of Migration to the North: Northern Discourses in Published Migrant Narratives in Norwegian.
Show summary
Research on images of the North has established a repertoire of images based mainly on travel writing, mythologies, policy documents and literary fictions featuring local or metropolitan viewpoints. Such topoi often combine northern discourses with discourses of arcticity, winterliness, Nordicity etc. This paper sets out to map images of northernness in postcolonial migrant literature featuring viewpoints originating from the global ”South”, examining a number of fictional or autobiographical public narratives written by migrants to Norway arriving in Norway as children or young adults, including books by Amal Aden, Maria Amelie, Romeo Gill, and Sara Azmeh Rasmussen. Tying in to ongoing research on changing border concepts in migrant narratives within the EU FP7 EUBORDERSCAPES project, the paper asks to what degree various topoi of northerness contribute to bordering processes in the texts, and whether these processes in turn produce new images of northernness. Are North and South purely framed in terms of difference? Is Northernness ascribed to specific cultural values? Are the extended and repeated border crossings these narratives figure connected to specifically Northern territories, as suggested by the title of the collection, Neste stopp Nordpolen: Nye nordmenn – nye stemmer (Next Stop the North Pole: New Norwegians – New Voices, 2005)?
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Visibility and Invisibility in Recent Published Migrant Narratives in Norwegian.
Show summary
Contemporary published migrant narratives in Norwegian are narratives of migrant experience which have been introduced into the public sphere and are both adapted to and adapt hegemonic borderscapes. Such narratives help to counter the focus on crisis in bordering policy and spectacle. They often present the process of entering into a public sphere whose aesthetic regime is both literary and political as part of a border-crossing extending through the borderscape from the original topographical border-crossing into Norway to the point of writing. Coming to Norway is also coming to writing or at least coming to a new form of writing. This paper examines two recent (2015) books by already established migrant writers in Norway, both positioned more as witnesses, polemicists and documentarists writing under pseudonyms than as literary authors. Amal Aden’s Jacayl er kjærlighet på Somali: En fortelling (”Jacayl is love in Somali: A story”) is a step into the world of fiction, written together with a literary author, Håvard Syvertsen. As in earlier books, this novel focuses on repressive family structures in Somali society in Somalia or in the diaspora. However, it also subtly makes visible the fate of boat migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Marie Amelie’s Takk (”Thank you”) is a sequel to her story of her stay as an illegal migrant in Norway, Ulovlig norsk (”Illegally Norwegian”, 2010). The previous book led to her arrest and deportation, which are described here along with public protests, a change in immigration law (known as ”lex amelie”) and the granting of a legal stay permit. The sequel attempts to negotiate her sense of unease at being a spectacular representative of a large number of unknown illegals, partly by making visible other deportees met at the Trandum deportation prison (a ”camp”) situated by Oslo airport. The paper argues that in both books, migrant authors with an access to the Norwegian public sphere attempt to make visible other, invisible migrants, revealing at the same time different strategies of negotiating the hegemonic borderscape.
This working paper gives some of the interpretations and working hypotheses reached at this stage of my contribution to research within the EUBORDERSCAPES project Working Package 10, Research Task 3: ”Cultural Borders of Europe ‘Bordering’ and ‘Re-bordering’ Europe through Fictional Narratives: The Case of Immigrant ‘Others’”. The paper examines migration literature written and published in Norwegian by the children of migrants or migrants born elsewhere but growing up partly in Norway, for rhetorical and narrative figurations of borders and border-crossings which can provide keys to changing conceptions of borders and to the values these are ascribed. The paper argues for the close connection between border concepts in the corpus and the status of the books as performative acts crossing from private experience to public discourse. This process is often explicitly addressed in the texts themselves and is part of an extended borderscape. I intend later to address further texts, the negotiation of border concepts in the reception of texts, the social context and research literature on migration in Norway, and research literature on migration literature in general.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Å vandre inn i (og ut av) litteraturen.
Show summary
Parallelt med den romlige vendingen i kultur- og litteraturvitenskapene har vi sett en økende interesse for det som skjer på kantene, på grensene, på de steder der symbolske, topografiske og tekstuelle enheter både defineres og forstyrres. Periferien har blitt til sentrum, og særlig innenfor postkoloniale og andre kulturpoetiske tilnærminger til litteratur har personer som lever på eller krysser grenser blitt til hovedpersoner og fokuset har vært på mellomrom, hybride rom og tredje rom. Grenseorienterte analyser av litteraturen har florert. Utfordringene kommer nå fra to kanter. På den ene siden har fokuset på rom og identitet gjort at grenselesninger ofte har falt tilbake på de motiviske bestanddelene i teksten: altså på setting og personer, og på topografiske og symbolske grenser. Dette betyr at det ofte gjenstår å spørre hvordan grensene til de presentasjonsformer som brukes i litterære tekster – tekstens kanter og overganger mellom fortellerformer, sjangre, stiler, virkelighet/fiksjon osv. – innvirker på forståelsen av grenser og av teksten det gjelder. På den andre siden skjer det en rask teoretiske utviklingen innenfor mer samfunnsvitenskapelige grensestudier. Hvordan kan forskningen på litterære grenser, både i tekstenes verdener og i deres stilistiske former, ta innover seg nye begrep fra dette feltet, som f.eks. b/ordering og borderscapes? Jeg skal innom to forskningsområder for å undersøke disse utfordringer videre: migrasjonslitteratur og arktiske diskurser. Begge kan vanskelig tenkes uten tverrvitenskapelige innslag: de krysser grensene både ut av og inn i litteraturen, og dermed tekstuelle grenser. Arbeid med migrasjonslitteratur kan kartlegge grensefigurer (altså ”figurer” i retorisk betydning) i litterære tekster som nøkler for å forstå historiske endringer i grensebegreper på mer allmenne kulturelle, sosiale og politiske plan. Arbeid med historiske arktiske diskurser kan undersøke overgangene mellom aktiviteter i Arktis, det medialiserte Arktis og det litterariserte Arktis – også i motsatt retning. Jeg argumenterer her for at grensene som utgjøres av litteraturen som presentasjonsform i seg selv må være gjenstand for historiske forandringer og for forstyrrelser. Samtidig gir borderscape-begrepet en antydning om at litteraturens formelle grenser virker inn i et metaforisk landskap sammen med andre typer grenser. Innvandringsfortellinger kommer gjerne til et punkt der selve skriften blir til en del av de territoriale og kulturelle grensepasseringene tekstene tematiserer. Litterære grenselesninger må ta innover seg at grenseflater vikles inn i hverandre og selve skillet mellom grenser i det motiviske og i presentasjonsformen åpner for gråsoner og mellomrom.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Crowley, Cornelius & Smith, Matthew (2016). Table ronde/Roundtable.
Meet film-maker and researcher, Keina Espiñeira, along with three literary scholars working with borders, fiction and migration, to discuss borders in literature and film. The Color of the Sea: A Filmic Border Experience in Ceuta, directed by Keina Espiñeira, will be shown and afterwards there will be a debate. See trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgCTlQiwMMc - How do novels and films present borders in this age of global contact and migration? - Where is the border between reality and fiction when migrants and others cross borders? - How do we represent migrant experience in an ethical way? The movie has been nominated for the 2016 European Short Film Awards and is made within the framework of a major EU research project on borders, EUBORDERSCAPES. Participants: Keina Espiñeira (Spain) is a scholar and filmmaker. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork from a multidisciplinary approach. Borders have a pivotal role in her work. Lill-Ann Körber (Oslo/Berlin) is a scholar of Scandinavian Studies at the Universities of Oslo and Bergen with a primary interest in the colonial history of the Nordic countries and their postcolonial relationships with Africa, the Caribbean, and the North Atlantic. Karin Kukkonen (Oslo) is a scholar of comparative literature with a particular interest in the constant negotiation of the boundaries between literature and life, as stories captivate the imagination of their readers. Johan Schimanski (Oslo) is scholar of comparative literature at the Universities of Oslo and of Eastern Finland, researching on borders in literature, Arctic literature and literary exhibitions.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Kvistad, Erika Johanna & Wiedlocha, Julia (2016). Feminisme og Fantastikk. En samtale om Angela Carter og Helen Oyeyemi.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike (2016). About the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike (2016). Litteraturmuseum i Europa i eit kritisk-teoretisk perspektiv.
Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). "Hvordan leve sammen. Roland Barthes og fantasien om et idiorytmisk liv", I: Knut Stene-Johansen; Christian Refsum & Johan Henrik Schimanski (red.),
Å leve sammen. Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet.
Spartacus.
ISBN 978-82-304-01781.
Innledning.
s 11
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Building on previous work tracing the narrative and rhetorical production of border concepts in novels and autobiographical texts which address the Somali diaspora experience in Norway, this paper assesses the impact of such narratives on bordering and borderscaping processes in the public sphere. By situating book publications by Amal Aden and Roda Ahmed in a broader field of public discourse including book reviews, social media, immigration debates and research dissemination, the paper compares the borderscape produced in the texts themselves with the borderscapes resulting from their publication. Novels and published autobiographies can be seen as media events subject to mediation and remediation processes, or in an previous paradigm as texts with receptions involving specific horizons of expectation and genre protocolls. The two books which the paper takes as examples are both by women who were born in Somalia, but grew up in Norway. Roda Ahmed’s novel Forberedelsen (The Preparation, 2008) and the autobiography of the pseudonymous Amal Aden Mitt drøm om frihet (My Dream of Freedom, 2009). Both involve various kinds of topographical border crossings between Somalia and Norway or between Norwegian and British parts of the Somali diaspora, along with various symbolic, temporal, medial and epistemological border crossings. Along with major narrative border configurations concerning liberation and captivity, both present a repertoire of different border metaphors, each implying different conceptions of the border.In this paper, the focus will lie on how this repertoire compares with that found in the public reception of each book. Both books have been followed by newspaper reviews, book blog entries, social media discussions, library recommendations, public debates, and mass media interviews in which the metaphorical border landscapes in the texts themselves are remediated and negotiated. Both must be read against a background of public debate on immigration and the production of research-based documentary books, academic studies and teaching materials on immigrant cultures and the Somali diaspora in Norway. Aden has been an important voice in the public sphere, publishing books on questions related to immigration, writing newspaper columns, giving talks, etc. The paper will use discourse analyse with a focus on border concepts in the form of rhetorical figures (e.g. metaphors) and narrative configurations as ”nodal points” thus allow for comparisons which reveal and suggest ways in which literary and biographical narratives affect public attitudes to borders and also border policies.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). Changing Borders in Public Immigrant and Diaspora Narratives in Norwegian.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). Current research on borders and on the Arctic; introduction to a documentary with Nadine Gordimer.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). Disrupting Nordic Borders: Postcolonial Border Concepts in Contemporary Swedish Migrant Fiction.
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Descriptions of territorial and symbolic borders in migrant fiction presumably provide keys to understanding shifting border concepts in the current global situation. This paper will examine border tropes and narratives of border-crossing in a selection of well-received Swedish novels of migration and diasporic identities: Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Montecore: en unik tiger, 2006 (translated as Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, 2011), Johannes Anyuru’s En storm kom från paradiset (2012) and Sami Said’s Väldigt sällan fin (2012). All three novels articulate an African-European borderscape, interrupting their Swedish frameworks by circling around a temporal border, the post- in postcolonial, and performing acts of diasporic memory. A short analysis of border concepts within postcolonialist discourse is followed by a closer examination of border tropes and narratives of territorial border-crossings in the three novels, with a focus on these contemporary Swedish negotiations of postcolonial borderings and the way in which they can be connected to aesthetic and affective values.
På 1990-tallet virket ikke grenser relevante mer. Berlinmuren hadde fallt, en trengte ikke lenger å vise pass når en reiste på kontinentet, og vi var på vei inn i globaliseringstidsalder der alt skulle handle om flyt. I dag virker denne tiden som en fremmed verden: farlige og dødsbringende grenser er gjenstand for mediaoppmerksomheten, det bygges murer og gjerder på grenser som aldri før, grensekontrollen har spredt seg inn i urbane rom og den digitale sfæren, grenser virker allestedsnærværende. Samtidig presenteres vi for en stigende antall litterære og filmatiske skildringer av grenser. Hvilken betydning har grensens litteratur og grensens estetikk? Kan litteratur, film og andre kunstarter bidra til å endre våre grensebegrep?
Arktis har i lang tid vært et utilgjengelig sted, som en annen planet, eller et sted som ville bare kunne utforskes i framtiden, et sted for forestillinger og begjær, fremmed og skremmende, eller hvem vet? — kanskje et utopisk sted. Det er ikke rart at mye sf bruker Arktis som setting eller som inspirasjon. Det er nok å nevne Frankenstein, Jules Verne, The Left Hand of Darkness, eller Superman, men i tillegg kommer teorier om paradisiske øyer, åpne hav, eller en hul jordklode, samt de senere årenes CliFi. Hva kan sf fortelle oss om Arktis? Hva kan Arktis fortelle oss om sf?
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). The Arctic Imagination.
Zu diesem etwas anderen Literarischen Salon kommen die Historikerin Ulrike Spring von der Hochschule Sogn og Fjordane und der Literaturwissenschaftler Johan Schimanski von der Universität Oslo und präsentieren ihr Buch Passagiere des Eises, Polarhelden und arktische Dis- kurse 1874. Das Buch hat die österreichisch-ungarische Nordpolexpedition (1872-1874) zum Thema und betrachtet diese unter einem kulturwissenschaftlichen Blickpunkt. Die Polarfahrer erregten europaweit beträchtliche mediale Aufmerksamkeit, und nicht zuletzt warf die Expedition we- sentliche soziale, politische und kulturelle Fragen auf.
Im Sommer des Jahres 1872 brach die "Admiral Tegetthoff", ein Expeditionsschiff unter der Leitung der von Carl Weyprecht und Julius Payer ins nördliche Eismeer auf, um die Durchfahrt der bislang unbekannten Nordostpassage, der Strecke von Europa nach Ostasien, zu erkunden. Wenige Tage nach der Abfahrt blieb das Schiff westlich von Nowaja Semlja im Packeis stecken und wurde nach Nordwesten in bis dato unbekannte Polarregionen abgetrieben. Man stieß auf Land, erkundete und kartierte es und benannte es mit Verweis auf die Herkunft des österreich-ungarischen Entdeckertruppe "Franz-Josef-Land". Im Frühjahr 1874 entschloss sich die Expeditionsleitung schließlich, das Schiff im Eis zurückzulassen: Auf abenteuerlichem Weg gelang die Rückkehr nach Europa: Die 24-köpfige Mannschaft hatte nur einen Todesfall zu beklagen. Die Rückfahrt von der norwegischen Küste über Hamburg nach Wien wurde zum Medienereignis, die Ankunft in Wien blieb wochenlang im Mittelpunkt sozialer, politischer und kultureller Aufmerksamkeit. Die Rezeption dieses Ereignisses im nationalen und internationalen Diskurs erschließt ein Stück europäischer Kulturgeschichte.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). Borders between the Arctic and Central Europe.
Schimanski, Johan (2014). Border Culture: Aesthetics/Poetics/Literatures.
Schimanski, Johan (2014). Changing Border Concepts in Published Immigrant Narratives in Norway and Sweden.
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This paper will provide a comparative and contrapuntual analysis of border concepts in cultural production, using Norwegian and Swedish published immigrant narratives as examples. A new generation of immigrant community writers who have spent parts or the whole of their childhoods in Norway have acquired a competence in Norwegian public debate and literary culture. Novels, short stories, published anonymized letters, fictionalized, autobiographies, fictionalized life-stories constitute a corpus of publically visible representations of migrant cultures which cross the symbolic border from private experience to the public sphere. The paper will ask why these narratives address transnational mobility and emphasize territorial border crossings in a more explicit way than in earlier immigrant literature in the English-speaking sphere. Grounding interpretations of bordering in the cultural sphere involves correlating the performative force of aesthetic works in a social context to an analysis of content and form. In narrative texts, border concepts are performed through various rhetorical figures and narratives. Close border poetics readings result in a repertoire of border figures, keys to the text's negotiation of border concepts. The paper will compare novels and fictionalized autobiographies by with Somali (Amal Aden, Roda Ahmed), Subcontinental (Nasim Karim, Romeo Gill) and Caucasian (Marie Amalie) backgrounds. While such narratives in Norway cater to disparate desires for knowledge, identification, debate, and aesthetic experience, this paper will ask why none apply the postmodernist, metafictional and magical realist strategies typical of the international migrant literature canon, refering contrapuntually to Swedish examples (Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Enel Melberg).
Schimanski, Johan (2014). Constructing imagery, mythologies of the Arctic.
Schimanski, Johan (2014). Korleis arbeide fram ein god EU-søknad? Korleis gå fram og kva er dei viktigast suksessfaktorane? Korleis kan fleire frå IKL nå opp med slike søknader?.
Schimanski, Johan (2014). Liminal spaces of migration and writing: Marie Amelie’s Ulovlig norsk.
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This paper is based on research on border concepts in migrant literature within a work package on ”Border Crossing and Cultural Production” in the research project EUBORDERSCAPES. The paper explores the possibility of using different concepts of liminality to identify operative border concepts in a migrant narratives published in Norwegian, both on the plane of the territorial border crossings described in these narrative, and on the border-crossings from private to public, from experience to literature, constituted by this publication. Maria Amelie’s Ulovlig norsk (”Illegally Norwegian”, 2010) tells the temporally clearly delimited story of the pseudonymous Russian (North-Ossetian) author while living without papers in Norway, from 2003 to the publication of the book. On publication, the author became a cause célèbre: She was arrested outside a public speaking engagement, underwent trials, became the focus of controversy and public demonstrations, was deported and then readmitted to Norway after a change of rules known as ”Lex Amelie”. A reading of border figures in the book, a testimonial, raises questions on the function of liminal and liminoid spaces, individual and societal transitions, and published literature as a liminal or liminoid space.
