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
2016-2019 visiting 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
Current Appointments
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)
Leader workshop-serien “Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing: Contemporary Public Migration Narratives in Europe”, Universitetet i Oslo i samarbeid med University of Eastern Finland, University of Jyväskäla og Dalarna University (NOS-HS, 2019-2020)
Red. Johan Schimanski, Cathrine Theodorsen and Henning Howlid Wærp, eds. Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis. Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk, 2011.
Anka Ryall, Johan Schimanski and Henning Howlid Wærp, eds. Arctic Discourses. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
Refsum, Christian; Stene-Johansen, Knut & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Introduction, In Knut Stene-Johansen; Christian Refsum & Johan Schimanski (ed.),
Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community.
Transcript Verlag.
ISBN 978-3-8376-4431-9.
Introduksjon.
s 9
- 20
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 (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
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). XÉNITEIA/xeniteia, In Knut Stene-Johansen; Christian Refsum & Johan Schimanski (ed.),
Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community.
Transcript Verlag.
ISBN 978-3-8376-4431-9.
Kapittel.
s 313
- 322
Show summary
Translation of Xéniteia/Utlendighet. Hvordan leve sammen: Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet. Ed. Christian Refsum, Johan Schimanski & Knut Stene-Johanssen. Oslo: Spartacus, 2016.
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). 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.
Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan (ed.) (2018). Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community.
Transcript Verlag.
ISBN 978-3-8376-4431-9.
400 s.
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.
In border poetics, thresholds are border figurations which configure the border as a place of overlap and disjuncture between different versions of the border in different dimension (the topographical, the symbolic, the temporal, the epistemological, the textual). Even the most concrete topographical threshold dividing between the inside and the outside of the house complicates the unambiguous image of the border as a line on a single surface: thresholds are often symbolic divisions between the public and the private, spaces in which we can allow the other in over our epistemological border; crossing them or standing on them involves temporalities; and they are the borders of the house seen as a material medium. Because of their similarity with another figuration of the border, the fold, the threshold can suggest doubling, ambiguity and reflexivity; they are in-betweens in which we are in one space but partake in an other. Standing on the threshold, we can cross the epistemological boundary without crossing the topographical boundary. Perhaps by this very token, the fold of the threshold can imply a power hierarchy. As a border figuration, the threshold is what Rancière calls a ‘partage du sensible', a division or a sharing of the seeable and the hearable and thus, as Rancière would argue, an political aesthetic. I will be exploring the political aesthetic of threshold figurations and different conceptions of liminality using examples from fictions and testimonials of migration, arguing that the threshold is not only a typical aesthetic figuration, but intimately connected to (most conceptions of) the process of aesthesis, sensing or perception. Along the way I will suggest ways of connecting border poetics and border aesthetics with the parallel and connected tradition of liminality studies in literature and art.
Johan Schimanski is Professor of Comparative Literature and Head of Research at the Department of Literature, European Languages and Area Studies at the University of Oslo, and part-time research Professor of Cultural Encounters at the University of Eastern Finland. His research interests include border poetics, Arctic discourses, postcolonialism, national identity, science fiction, literary museums. Recent publications include (with Ulrike Spring) an interdisciplinary monograph on images of the Arctic in 1870s Central Europe, Passagiere des Eises: Polarhelden und arktische Diskurse 1874 (2015) and (edited with Stephen Wolfe) a collaboration on key concepts within border aesthetics, Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections (2017).
Schimanski, Johan (2018). Raum und Grenze: Theoretischer Impuls.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Arktiske diskurser og fortellinger.
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 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 border traumas they involve, necessitating investigation of cultural memory in diasporic and multi-generational contexts.
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, involving specific horizons of expectation and genre protocols. The paper addresses books by Roda Ahmed and Amal Aden, both were born in Somalia, but grew up in Norway. Both involve various kinds of topographical border crossings between Somalia and Norway or between different 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. Here 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. Discourse analyses 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 (2018). Crossing and Gendering Borders.
Show summary
Can crossings of borders be gendered? We know that women and men have been ascribed different roles in historical discourses of national identity (Sommer 1990; Yuval-Davis 1997), but what about discourses of bordering and border-crossing? In this lecture I will be using a border poetics approach to analyse both theoretical concepts and narratives, focusing especially on topographical, symbolic and epistemological borders. I will be identifying narrative figures and configurations of space and time which can be connected to established border concepts such as the umbilical border object (Castillo 2007) and the matricial borderspace (Lichtenberg-Ettinger 1994), both of which call on bodily borders perceived as gendered. In order to establish these concepts, I will first use examples from previous readings (Lang and Schimanski 2010; Schimanski 2010, 2013) of literary texts by e.g. Jean Genet (1961), Veza Canetti (1994), Dannie Abse (1992), Terézia Mora (1999) and Yoko Tawada (1991). From these departure points I will address in more detail passages in two published migration narratives written by 1.5-generation Somalian-born migrants to Norway, Roda Ahmed’s novel Forberedelsen (2008, “The Preparation”) and Amal Aden’s testimonial Min Drøm Om Frihet (2009, “My Dream of Freedom”). Finally, I will be asking whether certain central concepts within feminist discourse and feminist theory – such as gender roles, the glass ceiling, situated knowledge, double vision, écriture féminine, corporeal feminism, intersectionality, nomadic subjects and queerness – might be seen as border concepts, and how they may be applied to migration literature.
Border Theory, Border Poetics and Border Aesthetics are theoretical formations which inhabit the interstices between Literary, Cultural and Border Studies in the wake of poststructuralism, postcolonialism and Chicana/o studies. In this lecture I will be tracing an archaeology of the theoretical concerns, concepts and interdisciplinary engagements which have developed in these approaches to borders. What may such an archaeology tell us about possible future developments in the study of borders and culture in a world in which borders have become globalized, such as the recent formation of the Border Textures concept?
Because so many border-crossings take the form of extended border-crossings – one can never be sure when the border has actually been crossed – it can often seem that travellers and migrants who have crossed a national border have not really crossed the border at all. It is as if they have taken the border with them, and still exist in bubble-like extension of the territory they come from. They visit or live in another country, but are bordered off from their surroundings by the symbolic boundaries of culture and language, a border which can follow the topographical contours of a diasporic or touristic community or their own bodies. Or they live on these borders they have nominally crossed, in hybrid cultures and ambivalent spaces: they have both crossed and not crossed the border. In both cases, the external border has been moved into the territory and become an internal border, either to the territory or the border-crosser’s self. In his “DissemiNation” essay, Homi K. Bhabha shows how the external borders of the nation always are intimately connected to its internal borders in an uncanny way. The (il)logic of ext/internal borders may also apply to larger territories: Europe is a case in point. But multinational continental spaces pose their own challenges, since the folding of external territorial borders onto internal spaces through travel and migration overlays a space which is already divided, into nations and, in the European case, the divides between “real Europes” and “other Europes”. The location of the outer border of Europe is unsure: it may only be an outer border in one conception of Europe, and at the same time be an inner European border in another conception of Europe. Imperial, colonial and cold war histories have placed the borders of Europe at radically different places on the globe, so a border far away from todays’ present external European border may in memory have been an outer border of Europe. In the workshop we will be using parts of the border poetics toolbox to show how published texts can function as public engagements with geopolitical transformations. We will be examining together passages from two books which contain memory narratives of in/external borders and migrations on both national and continental scales: Spaltkopf (first published in German, 2008, translated as Splithead, 2011) by Julya Rabinowich, born in 1970 in Moscow and emigrating with her family to Austria in 1977; and Seperator (first published in Norwegian translation, 2011, published in Swedish, 2012) by Enel Melberg, born in Tallinn in 1943 and fleeing with her family to Sweden in 1944. We will be asking how these narratives – both as texts and as representations of the world inside texts – use rhetorical and narrative (con-)figurations as aesthetic and epistemological engagements in order to negotiate memories of ex/internal European borders.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Visitors through Time: Homes, Heritage and Hospitality.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). What is the North Like? Questions and Answers While Crossing Borders.
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 an imagology of Northerness 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 research on changing border concepts in migrant narratives which took place within 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 in these texts? Is Northernness in migration narratives 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)? Or do images in migration discourse challenge methodological nationalism and eurocentricism? Furthermore I will be asking whether migrants function not only as border crossers and writers, but also as cultural analysts and ethnographers engaged in “research”, “interpretation” and “asking questions about” their new homes? Research, travelling or otherwise, is a form of border-crossing. Like migrants, people who ask questions are subject to typical border-phenomena such as disorientation and liminality, sometimes accompanied by the desire to fix images of others (and the self).
Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Refsum, Christian; Stene-Johansen, Knut & Blasy, Stefanie (2018). How to Live Together. Und. Heft für Alternativen, Widersprüche und Konkretes.
(5), s 25- 27
We will be presenting the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums, and taking our departure point in various examples, discussing 1. how author museums can be both read as historical sources to authors’ intentions and themselves be read as intended texts, 2. how Author museums can focus on the contemporary and historical intentions of the Authors and exhibition producers, and 3. how author museums can give authority to specific authors and texts in canonization processes.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Arctic Southerners: Ethnonyms, Languages and Qualities in the Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition in the 1870s and Today.
Show summary
While the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition of 1872-1874 has often been eclipsed by the expeditions of Franklin, Nansen, Amundsen and Scott within the global imagination, it was widely reported in the newspapers and popular press of the time and has later been the subject of numerous accounts, polar histories, scientific publications, paintings, novels etc. The expedition thus constitutes a major discursive event, lying at the epicentre of an extended media complex spreading out across history and through different forms, genres and planes of discourse. Scenes, characters and narratives have been repeated in different contexts and are thus subject to what Foucault has called “material repeatability”: the ability of the same material signifier to appear in different discourses, often signifying quite different things in each case. The negotiation of cultural identities is an important element in the discourse of Arctic expeditions, as it is in many other types of discourse. The Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition media complex involves very many cultural identities, along with identities of class, gender, etc. This mirrors the multicultural make-up of both the expedition and of the producers of discourse on the expedition. Here we concentrate on aspects of one part of the complicated structure of cultural identities, namely that involving the seamen, who are various described as coming mostly from a geographical space stretching over part of the NE coast of the Adriatic, including Trieste, the Istrian peninsula, the islands of Kvarner Bay, and the Dalmatian coast and islands. On the return of the expedition in 1874, their identities were articulated through ethnonyms, languages and the ascription of specific qualities; we argue that the medial discourse of the time can be related to negotiations of national identity and changes in language policies within the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy. In the latter half of the 20th Century and the early 21st Century, quite disparate notions of the seamen’s identities have developed in representations of the expedition in book and web media, again within the context of transformed perceptions of national identity.
When we visit an author museum, especially an author’s home, the objects and rooms suggest to us the author who has lived there. The author will have seen, touched or used many of the objects, but the author’s body is itself not present. It is as if the author haunts the house of the author museum, yet we do not feel afraid or uncomfortable. In this paper we will take as our departure point two ghost stories in Selma Lagerlöf’s Löwensköldska ringen, and discuss the many-layered narratives, intentions, heritages, identities, temporalities and presentation strategies which author’s home museums, like the ghost stories, involve. Using Selma Lagerlöf’s Mårbacka and other examples of authors’ homes and literary museums, we will ask how the author’s home uses such multi-layering to create authority, how such multilayering may allow the museum to open itself to transformation, and whether a focus on the spectral is a way of counteracting tendencies to make the museum into a monument or memorial to the author? We will also be be arguing for the potential to understand the author’s home through the author’s texts: in Selma Lagerlöf’s case especially in the way she describes care, inheritance, hospitality and hauntings in the many houses which figure in her fictions.
When we visit an author museum, especially an author’s home, the objects and rooms suggest to us the author who has lived there. The author will have seen, touched or used many of the objects, but the author’s body is itself not present. It is as if the author haunts the house of the author museum, yet we do not feel afraid or uncomfortable. In this lecture we will take as our departure point two ghost stories in Selma Lagerlöf’s Löwensköldska ringen, and discuss the many-layered narratives, intentions, heritages, identities, temporalities and presentation strategies which author’s home museums, like the ghost stories, involve. Using Mårbacka and other examples of authors’ homes and literary museums, we will ask how the author’s home uses such multi-layering to create authority, how such multilayering may allow the museum to open itself to transformation, and whether a focus on the spectral is a way of counteracting tendencies to make the museum into a monument or memorial to the author? We will also be be arguing for the potential to understand the author’s home through the author’s texts: in Selma Lagerlöf’s case especially in the way she describes care, inheritance, hospitality and hauntings in the many houses which figure in her fictions.
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.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). The Museum of Transnational 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
- 22
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.
