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Gfrereis, Heike; Neundlinger, Helmut; Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2021).
Literature, Exhibitions and Communication: A Conversation.
Culture et Musées.
ISSN 1766-2923.
s. 251–272.
Vis sammendrag
Informed by her competence in literature and the theory and practice of exhibitions, Heike Gfrereis is Head of the Museum Department at the Archive of German Literature in Marbach, and curator of many literary exhibitions. Helmut Neundlinger, curator of the W. H. Auden Memorial Museum in Kirchstetten, is a writer, researcher and critic working at the Center for Museum Collections Management at the Danube University Krems and the literary collection of Lower Austria. The following “exchange of knowledge” between them and two researchers in the TRAUM project –Transforming Author Museums– took place in Oslo in 2019. We discuss the desire to exhibit literature and not only biography, how one can free oneself from objects, how to unlearn received notions of literature, the importance of interaction and play, what can make authors difficult to exhibit, and the economic realities of exhibiting literature.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2021).
Border Traumas, Aesthetics and Memory.
Vis sammendrag
Taking as its departure point the use of photographs in a novel by Swedish author Johannes Anyuru, this lecture examines the role of border traumas and memory objects in migration literature with help of border aesthetics. We ask whether published narratives of migrant border-crossing may involve the longer, ‘despectacularizing’ temporalities of cultural memory in diasporic and multi-generational contexts.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2021).
Space, Borders and Cognition in Urban Diasporic Fiction.
Vis sammendrag
Literature involves characters living in spaces and events ‘taking place’, but also the spatial existence of authors, texts and readers. But can one discuss literary spaces without addressing the boundaries and relationships that constitute them? How may border poetics serve, supplement or challenge spatial poetics? How do readers cross the borders into literary spaces?
Narrative relies on characters crossing boundaries between symbolic spaces (e.g. families, classes, cultures, life stages) – boundaries often manifested as topographical borders on different scales. One needs only think of the many novels about characters who move in and out of houses, who move between rural and urban spaces, or who move across the borders of nations. In this paper I will be examining a corpus of urban diasporic fictions set in the city of Oslo. While much contemporary migration literature in Norwegian focuses on crossings across Norway’s national borders, this paper examines novels focusing on the topographical borderlands of city suburbs and the symbolic borders between cultures. Zeshan Shakar’s Tante Ulrikkes vei (‘Aunt Ulrikke’s Street’ 2017) and Maria Navarro Skaranger’s Alle utlendinger har lukka gardiner (‘All Foreigners have their Curtains Closed’ 2015), have attracted much recent attention. They follow on previous examples such as Mala Naveen’s Desiland (2010) and the ‘father’ of contemporary Norwegian diasporic literature, Khalid Hussain’s Pakkis (1986) – as well as relating to a wider international corpus.
In approaching some of the above texts the paper expands on Anne-Maria Sturm’s work (2020) on combining the narratology of space with border poetics in the study of migration literature. However, in line with recent proposals within the interdisciplinary field of border studies, focusing specifically on urban borders (Scott 2020), the paper suggests that cognitive approaches may also be key to understanding the function of borders and cultural encounters between people, characters, readers and texts. Using elements of 4E (Embedded, Embodied, Extended, Enacted) theories of cognition already applied within literary studies (e.g. Kukkonen 2019), its sees the novels concerned as using the formal techniques at their disposal to help readers think through what it is to live on urban and diasporic boundaries.
Kukkonen, Karin. 2019. 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet (Oxford University Press: New York, NY).
Scott, James Wesley. 2020. 'Cognitive Geographies of Bordering: The Case of Urban Neighbourhoods in Transition', Theory & Psychology, [issue not assigned]: 1-18.
Sturm, Anne-Maria. 2020. Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen: llija Trojanow – Dimitré Dinev – Sibylle Lewitscharoff – Evelina Jecker Lambreva (Frank & Timme: Berlin).
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Schimanski, Johan
(2021).
Temporalities and migratory border-crossings in literature and other discourse.
Vis sammendrag
In the virtual lecture, Johan Schimanski presents the work he has been leading on temporalities and migratory border-crossings in literature and other discourse. He will offer a general reflection on borders and temporalities through the lens of border poetics.
Certain ongoing processes connected to bordering practices, such as migration, pandemics and Brexit, have been presented in the public sphere as “crises”, unconnected to more complex, long-term temporalities. Such long-duration conditions and changes have been brought to the public attention in investigative journalism and social sciences research. The temporalities of bordering practices have been the subject of intense ethnographic research in migration studies, as well as on a more theoretical level by border studies scholars. The literature of migration mostly seems to address even longer duration temporalities, providing an antidote to the shorter scale narratives of politics and news media.
Given that borders are usually seen as spatial phenomena, how do they allow for temporal borders? Borders and borderlands have been addressed in historical terms as subject to bordering, debordering and rebordering, as mobile, and as palimpsestual border landscapes. Border poetics has focused on the analysis of more everyday border-crossing narratives, involving complex spatio-temporal figurations of the border. Schimanski discusses migration literature with its focus on the long-duration nature of migration, with various cultural borders often being crossed long after the topographical. He presents ongoing research in the NOS-HS workshop series “Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing” which connects the temporality of migrant crossing topographical border by migrant to their crossings into the public sphere through literature and other discourse.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2021).
(Un)folding European Borders.
I Müller-Funk, Wolfgang; Spreicer, Jelena & Steininger, Gerlinde (Red.),
Borders of Europe.
Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici.
ISSN 9788895868547.
s. 45–56.
Vis sammendrag
The volume, the output of a conference held at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici (Rome, 27 Frebruary-1 March 2019), entails two different issues. On the one hand it aims to discuss the state of the arts with regard to the philosophical and cultural discourse on liminal phenomena, while, on the other hand, it refers to the everyday life of European politics, which is not only influenced by the debate on migration and on the borders of the European Union, between Europe and its neighbours, but also within its own member states.
The title is deliberately ambiguous. It calls into questions whether Europe can be defined by specific modes of demarcations, but it also points to the quality and nature of these borders (inside as well as outside) and to the role and function of the half-continent.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2021).
Von der Isolation in der Arktis zum Spektakel in Wien.
I Chahrour, Marcel; Höfler, Theresa; Schretzmayer, Birgit & Tavčar-Schaller, Andrea (Red.),
Sehnsucht Ferne – Aufbruch in neue Welten.
Schallaburg, Schallaburg Kulturbetriebsges.m.b.H..
ISSN 0000000000000.
s. 238–243.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2020).
Å få & å utvikle prosjektidéer.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2020).
Fixing Images of Movement: The Border Poetics of Photographs in the Swedish-African Literary Borderscape.
Vis sammendrag
Johannes Anyuru (b. 1979) and Jonas Hassen Khemiri (b. 1978) are both leading voices in contemporary Swedish literature. These two male authors both have Swedish mothers and fathers who have migrated from Africa, from Uganda and Tunisia respectively. Both engage with the entanglement of their fathers’ stories of migration with their own stories of becoming authors in the novels addressed here, En storm kom från paradiset (Anyuru 2012; trans. A Storm Blew in From Paradise Anyuru 2015) and Montecore: En unik Tiger (Khemiri 2006; trans. Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger 2011), using strategies from historiographic metafiction. In this lecture, Johan Schimanski will be placing the novels in the context of the African-European borderscape and giving readings of photographs and short textual excerpts from the two novels using the tools of border poetics. He will be exploring the roles of photographic images in these novels as borders (topographical, temporal, symbolic, epistemological, media, cf. Schimanski 2006), as border umbilical objects (Castillo 2007), and as traumatic images of bordering (Schimanski 2019), making reference to previous work on Anyuru’s novel (Schimanski 2017) and to work within border aesthetics (e.g. Brambilla and Pötzsch 2017).
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Gfrereis, Heike; Neundlinger, Helmut; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike
(2020).
Literature, Exhibitions and Communication: A Conversation.
Nordisk Museologi.
ISSN 1103-8152.
28(1),
s. 91–102.
doi:
10.5617/nm.7976.
Vis sammendrag
Informed by her competence in literature and the theory and practice of exhibitions, Heike Gfrereis is Head of the Museum Department at the Archive of German Literature in Marbach, and curator of many literary exhibitions. Helmut Neundlinger, curator of the W. H. Auden Memorial Museum in Kirchstetten, is a writer, researcher and critic working at the Center for Museum Collections Management at the Danube University Krems and the literary collection of Lower Austria. The following “exchange of knowledge” between them and two researchers in the TRAUM– Transforming Author Museums project took place in Oslo in 2019. We discuss the desire to exhibit literature and not only biography, how one can free oneself from objects and how objects can create freedom, how to unlearn received notions of literature, the importance of interaction and play, what can make authors difficult to exhibit, and the economic realities of exhibiting literature.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2020).
Border Poetics: Reading Narratives of Border Crossing.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2020).
Receding Ice Limits: A Historical-Rhetorical Genealogy.
Vis sammendrag
In 1873, the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition discovered Franz Josef Land. Viennese journalists fantasized rhetorically about extending imperial borders into the Arctic, commenting on social and political tensions within the dual monarchy rather than desiring to colonize a useless Arctic. Their images however built on 19th-century perceptions of the Arctic as a (possibly open) polar sea hidden by impenetrable barriers of ice. Ice limits shifted topographically with year and season, defined the structure of heroic exploration narratives, and functioned as epistemological barriers. Trying out new techniques and debunking the open sea theory, the expedition helped move exploration from the oceanosphere to the cryosphere.
Today, discourse on ice limits signifies the melting of the Arctic, economic opportunities and climate change. For some, a navigatable “open sea” gives liquidity to capital; for others, receding ice destroys a natural environment and becomes a catastrophic global tipping point. Analyzing texts and images from the 19th and 21st centuries, we show that Arctic, Danube and Alpine ice is not only a question of physical topographies, but also a changing rhetorical figuring of borders, lines, zones and thresholds, and that genealogical understanding of these discourses will enable action.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2020).
(Un)folding Borders.
Vis sammendrag
Border-crossings take the form of extended border-crossings, and it can often seem that those who have crossed a national border have not really crossed the border at all. 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. But the (il)logic of ex/internal borders may also apply to larger territories, such as those of Europe, with its historical 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. Here we will be looking at Julya Rabinowichs debut novel Spaltkopf (2011) to see how it – both as a text in the outside world and as a representation of the world inside the text – uses rhetorical and narrative (con-)figurations order to negotiate memories of historically changing ex/internal European borders.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2019).
Typologie von Dichterwohnungen.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2019).
Das trans/nationale Dichterheim.
Vis sammendrag
SchriftstellerInnenmuseen oder DichterInnenheime zeichnen sich gerne durch einen hagiographischen Zugang aus, in dem die SchriftstellerInnen in einem spezifischen nationalen Kontext verortet werden. Literatur, Kultur und Territorium werden in dieser Ausstellungspraxis zu einer Einheit; die gelebte Realität der Autorin als Reisende und die übernationale Popularität ihrer Literatur wird hingegen vernachlässigt. Der Vortrag wird Ausgangspunkt in verschiedensten musealen Repräsentationen von Autor und Literatur nehmen, diese auf ihr transnationales Potenzial untersuchen und dadurch neue Sichtweisen auf die Darstellung nationaler SchriftstellerInnen eröffnen. Als Beispiele dienen ungarische sowie andere europäische Museen.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2019).
kunnskapsutveksling, framtidig permanent Cora Sandel-utstilling.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2019).
Fixing Images of Movement: The Border Aesthetics of Photographs in Narratives of Trans-Mediterranean Migration.
Vis sammendrag
This lecture presents published narratives in Norwegian and Swedish about Trans-Mediterrean migration by authors such as Roda Ahmed, Johannes Anyuru and Jonas Hassan Khemiri in order to investigate the representation of migration as media spectacle, as trauma, as memory, and as border object. The lecture prepares for a focused discussion on migration, representation, narratives/images, border aesthetics and border poetics.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2019).
Ali Smith’s Border Analysis: Populism and Migration in the Seasonal Quartet.
Vis sammendrag
In her Seasonal Quartet, Scottish author Ali Smith has set out to describe the aftermath of the Brexit referendum close after the event, defying the tendency of literature to tackle historical events and experience in a long-term and retrospective temporality. The novels, currently being published in sequence according to the seasons described in each book - so far Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2018) have appeared, with Summer planned - both allows readers to identify with the sense of outrage and despair channeled through the main protagonists of the books and to respond to simplified populist images of migration and British identity. The books provide a counterpoint to their own synchrony with contemporary events by evoking the embodied memories of historical migration to Britain and the histories of marginalized female British artists. Borders are both a major explicit motif and theme in the books, and (as in principal in all literary texts) omnipresent in many other ways. This paper approaches the controversial concept of “populism” through the double lens of borders and migration, showing how Smith’s books formulate a border analysis of contemporary populism not only as focused on perceived threats to national borders (migration and the EU), but also as divisive form of internal bordering in communities. A discursive approach to competing definitions of “populism” (right-wing/left-wing, anti-elitist/democratic) will make possible a critical appraisal of Smiths literary negotiation of populism, community, diversity and democracy.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2019).
Exhibiting Transnational Mobility in the Author Museum.
Vis sammendrag
Author museums have long been associated with national narratives, yet with the increased awareness of the transnational mobility of authors, readers, visitors, literature and objects, museums have begun to focus more on international, transnational and cosmopolitan dimensions in their exhibitions. Indeed, author mobility has resulted in a number of old and new author museums situated outside the authors’ countries of origin.
Within the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums, financed by the Research Council of Norway, we (a historian with curatorial experience and a researcher in comparative literature) have developed an approach to literary exhibitions based around the idea that such exhibitions always involve (at least) a double act of communication. Literary exhibitions are messages sent from their curators to their visitors about messages sent from authors to readers. Using this simple model, we can understand better how author museums – for example the Strindberg Museum in Stockholm, or the Strindberg Museum in Saxen in Upper Austria – exhibit transnational mobilities on many different levels and concerning many different actors, texts, objects and spaces.
At the same time this rather reductive model of communication – as contemporary exhibitionary strategies make us aware – can be a key to understanding its own distorting limitations and productive paradoxes. Who is the Strindberg Museum in Saxen for – tourists cycling along the Danube and literary pilgrims, Swedish or Austrian or other? Or for local school students doing projects on Strindberg? Does the enlarged photograph of the local stone formations that inspired Strindberg’s visions in Inferno lead to the marked path near the museum, in the local and Austrian landscape, or to the book by the Swedish and cosmopolitan author on his time in both Paris and Saxen?
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Tennøe, Arthur; Spring, Ulrike; Undheim, Inger; Ryall, Anka; Aarbakke, Thea & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2019).
Å stille ut litteratur og forfattere.
Vis sammendrag
Hvorfor besøker vi utstillinger om forfattere og litteratur? Det finnes flere og flere forfattermuseer og forfattersentre i Norge, og bibliotekene lager regelmessig litteraturutstillinger. Er vi først og fremst opptatt av forfatterens liv eller forfatterens tekster når vi besøker slike utstillinger? Kan slike utstillinger brukes som møtesteder og bidra til et demokratisk samfunn? Hvilke strategier bruker museer, sentre og biblioteker når de stiller ut litteratur og forfattere, og hvorfor?
Lesning av forfatter Elizabeth Beanca Halvorsen, innlegg av Ulrike Spring fra Høgskulen på Vestlandet/Universitetet i Oslo, Arthur Tennøe fra Nasjonalbiblioteket, Inger Undheim fra Garborgsenteret, Thea Aarbakke fra Høgskulen på Vestlandet, og panelsamtale (ordstyrer: Arthur Tennøe) med Thea Aarbakke, Inger Undheim, Ulrike Spring, Anka Ryall fra Universitetet i Tromsø Norges arktiske universitet, og Johan Schimanski fra Universitetet i Oslo.
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Dvergsdal, Alvhild; Olsen, Marianne A.; Spring, Ulrike; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Fulsås, Narve
(2019).
Den vanskelige forfatteren.
Vis sammendrag
Siden 1800-tallet har vi hedret skjønnlitterære forfattere gjennom utstillinger og museer. Men hva skjer når det kommer fram at noen sider ved forfatteren ikke er så beundringsverdige? I dag avsløres kjente historiske forfattere for deres holdninger. Noen passer ikke inn i lokale og nasjonale fortellinger eller blir rett og slett ikke lenger lest. Hvordan skal vi utstille de «vanskelige» forfatterne?
Alvhild Dvergsdal fra Hamsunsenteret, Marianne A. Olsen fra Perspektivet Museum, Ulrike Spring fra Høgskulen på Vestlandet/Universitetet i Oslo og Narve Fulsås fra Universitetet i Tromsø innleder til debatt. Ordstyrer: Johan Schimanski fra Universitetet i Oslo
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2019).
(Un)folding European Borders in Narratives of Ex/internal Migration.
Vis sammendrag
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 (and Western 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 (or Western Europe).
Memories of in/external borders on both national and continental scales are publically negotiated in the two published, book length narratives I will be citing in this paper: 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. In this paper I will be arguing that these narratives – both as texts in the outside world and as representations of the world inside texts – use rhetorical and narrative (con-)figurations order to negotiate memories of historically changing ex/internal European borders.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2019).
Scaling between Border Poetics and Border Studies.
Vis sammendrag
Any wider conception of borders will have a correspondingly broad applicability. Borders can come into play between cultures, nations, regions and continents, but also on on a much smaller scale, for example on the level of bodies and texts. The discursive construction of borders in political, historical or everday life, will move between borders on different scales simply because discourse is the way we negotiate large-scale questions on the level of language. In this paper I will be using the opening of the semi-autobiographical novel Spaltkopf (2008, translated as Splithead, 2011) by Julya Rabinowich, in order to show how borders move between different levels of scale and mobilities of border-crossing. In doing so I will trace an archaeology of the theoretical concerns, concepts and interdisciplinary engagements which connect Border Poetics and the broader field of Border Studies, along with other research fields such as Border Theory, Border Aesthetics and Border Textures. 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?
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Refsum, Christian; Stene-Johansen, Knut & Blasy, Stefanie
(2018).
How to Live Together.
Und. Heft für Alternativen, Widersprüche und Konkretes.
s. 25–27.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2018).
Unfolding Ex/Internal Borders in Narratives of Migration: A Border Poetics Approach.
Vis sammendrag
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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2018).
Globalized Borders: An Archaeology of Border Theory, Border Poetics and Border Aesthetics.
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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?
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2018).
Visitors through Time: Homes, Heritage and Hospitality.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2018).
Can Border Narratives Change Public Conceptions of Borders? The Norwegian–Somali Borderscape in Literature, Public Debate and Knowledge Production.
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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, 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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2018).
Border Traumas, Aesthetics and Memory in Migration Literature.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2018).
Ghostly Voices in the Author Museum.
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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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2018).
Crossing and Gendering Borders.
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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.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2018).
Ghostly Voices in the Author Museum.
Vis sammendrag
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.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan
(2018).
Who speaks in the Author Museum? Finding intentions and authority in literary exhibitions.
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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.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2018).
Liminality and Border Poetics, Thresholds and Border Aesthetics.
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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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2018).
What is the North Like? Questions and Answers While Crossing Borders.
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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 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).
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Schimanski, Johan
(2018).
Raum und Grenze: Theoretischer Impuls.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2018).
Migrating Images of the North.
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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).
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2018).
Arktiske diskurser og fortellinger.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2017).
Uses of the Arctic: Resources and Discourses.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2017).
Border Traumas, Aesthetics and Memory: Photographs in Norwegian and Swedish Migration Literature.
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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]).
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2017).
Border Utopias, Border Dystopias.
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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’.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2017).
Border Utopias, Border Dystopias.
Vis sammendrag
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’.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2017).
The Museum of Transnational Literature.
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Volsing, Katrine; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Krogh, Andreas
(2017).
Homestuck: Internettets svar på Odysseen.
[Radio].
DR P1.
Vis sammendrag
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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2017).
Border Ob-scene, Border Non-Scene, Border Scene.
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Nesby, Linda; McGowan, Jérémie; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Wolfe, Stephen
(2017).
Border Aesthetics Book Launch.
Vis sammendrag
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
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2017).
Traumatic Figurations of Border-Crossing in Migrant Literature.
Vis sammendrag
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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2017).
Border Figurations in Migration Literature: A Border Poetics Approach.
Vis sammendrag
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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2017).
Grenzen, Arktis, Schriftstellermuseen.
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Buset, Pål; Riley, Jon Erik; Mathisen, Werner Christie; Herrman, Bjørn Alex; Auklend, Morten & Haug, Hallvard
[Vis alle 7 forfattere av denne artikkelen]
(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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Crossing the Borders between Languages: Narrative Uses of Multilingualism in Swedish and Norwegian Migration Literature
.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Grenser i migrasjonslitteratur.
Vis sammendrag
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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Crowley, Cornelius & Smith, Matthew
(2016).
Table ronde/Roundtable
.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Border Figurations in Migration Literature.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike
(2016).
About the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike
(2016).
Litteraturmuseum i Europa i eit kritisk-teoretisk perspektiv.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Arktisk science fiction.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Crossing the Borders between Languages: Narrative Uses of Multilingualism in Swedish and Norwegian Migration Literature.
Vis sammendrag
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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Figuration in Migration Narratives: Despectacularizing the Border Crisis.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Körber, Lill-Ann; Kukkonen, Karin & Espiñeira, Keina
(2016).
Are Borders Fictions? A film showing and a conversation.
Vis sammendrag
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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Arctic Literature – Creating the Arctic Story.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Kvistad, Erika Johanna & Wiedlocha, Julia
(2016).
Feminisme og Fantastikk. En samtale om Angela Carter og Helen Oyeyemi.
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Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
"Hvordan leve sammen. Roland Barthes og fantasien om et idiorytmisk liv".
I Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (Red.),
Å leve sammen. Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet.
Spartacus.
ISSN 978-82-304-01781.
s. 11–22.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Forbudt kjærlighet. Grenseoverskridelser i Romeo Gill og Roda Ahmed.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Innlegg på sluttpanel, "Är litteraturvetenskapen gränsöverskridande?".
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Å vandre inn i (og ut av) litteraturen.
Vis sammendrag
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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Smaadal, Camilla & Nævra, Arne
(2016).
Verdenskjent bilde: Symbol på motstridende verdier.
Apollon : Forskningsmagasin for Universitetet i Oslo.
ISSN 0803-6926.
2016(2),
s. 52–53.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Reading and Writing: Working inside/outside the Literary Field.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Seasons of Migration to the North: Northern Discourses in Published Migrant
Narratives in Norwegian.
Vis sammendrag
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)?
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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.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2015).
Borders between the Arctic and Central Europe.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2015).
Can Border Narratives Change Public Conceptions of Borders? The Norwegian–Somali Borderscape in Literature, Public Debate and Knowledge Production.
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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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2015).
Science fictions arktiske historie.
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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?
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2015).
Changing Borders in Public Immigrant and Diaspora Narratives in Norwegian.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2015).
Grensens litteratur.
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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?
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike
(2015).
Bokpresentasjon: Passagiere des Eises.
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Denne litterære salongen blir noe annerledes, siden det er historikeren Ulrike Spring fra Høgskolen i Sogn og Fjordane og litteraturviteren Johan Schimanski fra universitetet i Oslo som kommer og som presenterer boken Passagiere des Eises, Polarhelden und arktische Dis- kurse 1874.
Boken omhandler den østerriksk-ungarske nordpolekspedisjonen (1872-1874) og betrakter denne fra et kulturvitenskapelig ståsted. Polfarerne fikk mye oppmerksomhet i media over hele Europa, og i kjølvannet av ekspedisjonen dukket det opp vesentlige sosiale, kulturelle og politiske spørsmål.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2015).
The Arctic Imagination.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2015).
Playing the Arctic: Gender and Modernity in Arthur Ransome’s Winter Holiday.
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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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2015).
Krensens estestikk.
Kuiper.
ISSN 0809-8212.
2015(1),
s. 32–39.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2015).
Current research on borders and on the Arctic; introduction to a documentary with Nadine Gordimer.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Meknas, Dana
(2015).
Graver i ishavshistorien.
[Avis].
iTromsø.
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Intervju med utgångspunkt i Johan Schimanski og Ulrike Spring, Passagiere des Eises (2015).
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Spring, Ulrike & Braunsperger, Gudrun
(2015).
Dimensionen - die Welt der Wissenschaft: Pioniere der Arktis. Der mediale Nachhall der österreichisch-ungarischen Nordpolexpedition.
[Radio].
ORF Ö1 (Österreichischer Rundfunk, Radio Österreich 1).
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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.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2014).
Grensefigurer i publisette innvandrerfortellinger på norsk. En litteraturviter snakker til samfunnsvitere.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2014).
“Nordpolstilen”: Wien i Arktis, 1874.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2014).
Border Figures and Border Landscapes in Published Immigrant Narratives in Norway and Sweden.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2014).
Nordpolen i Wien: Den østerriksk-ungarske polarekspedisjonen (1872-1874) i karikaturtegninger.
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2014).
Playing the Arctic: Modernity and Gender in Arthur Ransome’s Winter Holiday.
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Arthur Ransome, an author and journalist who covered and who had close ties to Bohemian London before WWI and then to the Russian Revolution, is most famous for his series of twelve much-read children’s books known as the ”Swallows and Amazons” series (1930-1947). Unlike the rest of the books, Winter Holiday (1933) does not take place on moving, but on frozen water. Himself inspired by Nansen’s accounts of the crossing of Greenland and the Fram expedition, Ransome allows his children protagonists to transform the Lake District lake on which they spend their holidays into the scene of an Arctic expedition.
Ransome’s book invites contextual readings connecting the book to the discursive and political developments which accompanied his own career as a writer, along the line of Heidi Hansson’s analysis (2011) of A. A. Milne’s story of Winnie-the-Pooh’s ‘expotition’ to the North Pole as a productive model. Where Ransome is concerned, it seems natural to place emphasis on the ambivalent handling of imperial discourses in discovery narratives, but also (as Catherine M. Lynch has suggested) on post-WWI transformations in gender roles. Girl protagonists are main agents where both imagining and physical action are involved in Ransome’s books, and Winter Holiday is no exception.
The paper poses questions of changing imperial and gendered discourses between the wars as they are negotiated in Arthur Ransome’s fiction about/for children, and how these negotiations can be seen as negotiations of the modern. It examines the motif of fantasy play within fiction – in a sense, fictions within fictions – a recurring motif in Ransome’s books. To what degree does play help create a utopian or heterotopian Arctic modernity in which age and gender hierarchies are barred? Is the play motif/mode in itself a typically modern (ironic? defamiliarizing?) way of dealing with exotic geographies?
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan
(2014).
Steam & Furs.
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Austro-Hungarians in the Arctic 1874: proto-steampunk Jules Verne is one of the most-read authors in Europe and news reaches Vienna of the return of the Austro- Hungarian Arctic expedition after two years in the Arctic. Their triumphant journey through Norway, Sweden, Germany, Vienna and onwards to the farthest reaches of the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy is made possible by the reality of steam power, involving even the opening of a railway line from Pålsboda to Finspång. Journalists, authors, illustrators and caricaturists compete to produce the most fantastic imaginative images of their journey, including a novel-length satire in Hungarian – inspired by Jules Verne. Is the Arctic a place in which fur-costumed imperial heroes enter a primitive world, or is it the future? Ulrike Spring and Johan Schimanski’s book on the expedition and its reception will appear later this year.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2014).
Border Culture: Aesthetics/Poetics/Literatures.
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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).
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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.
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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?
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Schimanski, Johan
(2014).
Constructing imagery, mythologies of the Arctic.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2014).
Litteratur og grenser.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2013).
Ellisif Wessel som grensefigur. Litterære og biografiske resepsjoner.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2013).
The Bordering of the Sensible: Border Politics and Border Poetics.
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Refering to specific literary negotiations of Eastern European border zones and arguing for the need for investigation of imagined borderlands in cultural production, this paper reexamines the theoretical framework of border poetics from the point of view of Jacques Rancière’s exposition of politics and aesthetics. Border poetics is an analytical formation which asks us to be aware of not only of the various effects in the micronarratives of individual border crossings, but also the way in which the work of representation, narrativization, figuration, and aestheticization is integral to both border crossings and to bordering processes in general. It challenges us to connect the political and aesthetic, and this paper examines its theoretical underpinnings by relating it to Rancière’s formulation of the relationship between politics and aesthetics and especially to his conception of the “distribution of the sensible”.
A recent negotiation of the Norwegian-Russian borderlands is Cecilie Enger’s novel Himmelstormeren (2007), based on the life of the historical woman Ellisif Wessel (1866-1949), social activist and photographer. The Kafkaesque novel The City & The City (2009), by London author and scholar of international law China Miéville, is a theoretically sophisticated crime noir set in the fictional Central/Eastern European twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, presided over by the mysterious executive force the “Breach”. The paper focuses on the sensible in both cases as it relates to their handling of borders, in Enger through the motif of the photograph and in Miéville through the practice of “unseeing” the other city.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2013).
Humaniora, samfunnsvitenskap og grenser.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2013).
Borders of the Arctic in Exploration Narratives: The Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition 1872-1874.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2013).
Reading Changing Border Concepts in Published Immigrant Narratives: Nasim Karim and Romeo Gill.
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This paper aims to contribute to the formulation of a comparative framework for the analysis of border concepts in cultural production, using immigrant narratives as examples. 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 the use of various rhetorical figures for the border, along with the narrative and formal structures of border-crossings. Close border poetics readings result in a repertoire of border figures, keys to the text’s negotiation of border concepts. But what presuppositions about the border concept do such readings imply?
Literary postcolonial immigrant narratives in Norway cater to disparate desires for knowledge, identification, debate, and aesthetic experience. A new generation of immigrant community authors who have spent parts or the whole of their childhoods in Norway have acquired a competence in Norwegian literary culture. Novels and autobiographies address transnational mobility and emphasize territorial border crossings. My examples here are novels by the children of subcontinental immigrants: Nasim Karim’s Izzat – For ærens skyld (1996), and Romeo Gill’s Harjeet (2008) and Ung mann i nytt land (2011).
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan
(2013).
Fra et hav av is til et hav av mennesker: Mottakelsen av den østerriksk-ungarske polarekspedisjonen 1872-1874.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan
(2013).
The Melting Archive: The Arctic and the Archives' Others.
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The Arctic is today posed on the cusp of two discourses: one of enviromental conservationism, in which one wishes to keep the Arctic ice in its present state, the other of economic exploitation, producing scenarios of access to trade routes and petrochemical resources. Both come together in the image of the melting ice. The environmental discourse of the Arctic sees the Arctic as an archive of climate change history, of ways of life, and of genetic codes. Its more ecoactivist enunciators use strong images in order to sell their message, thereby giving global access to their symbolic resources and reproducing an economic logic of liquidity, signs as negotiable assets. Economic interests see the opening of the Arctic sea as a way of liquidizing assets in the face of climate change. In our paper we will examine the archaeology of the crisis of Arctic modernity, using connections between the first great modern economic depression beginning in the Panic of 1873, and the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition of 1872-1874. We will trace the origins of modernity within Arctic discourse to three fields, the scientific, the journalistic, and the aesthetic. This will form the basis for our argument concerning the constitutive connections between archival conservation and the liquid modernity, its other which seems to threaten it with destruction.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2013).
Aktuelle perspektiver på Goethes Faust.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2013).
Reading Changing Border Concepts in Published Immigrant Narratives: Roda Ahmed and Amal Aden.
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This paper aims to contribute to the formulation of a comparative framework for the analysis of border concepts in cultural production, using as examples two immigrant narratives. To ground interpretations of bordering in the cultural sphere one must correlate an investigation of social actants ¬– i.e. of the performative force of aesthetic works in a social context and their meaning for users and producers – to an analysis of content and form. In narrative texts, border concepts are performed through rhetorical means, i.e. the use of various figures (metaphors, synecdoches etc) for the border, along with narrative and formal structure of border-crossings, in themselves implying border figures. Close border poetics readings result in a repertoire of border figures, keys to the text’s negotiation of border concepts.
Literary postcolonial immigrant narratives in Norway can be traced back to the publication of Khalid Hussain’s novel Pakkis in 1986. The publication category expresses disparate desires for knowledge, identification, debate, and aesthetic experience. A new generation of immigrant community authors who have spent parts or the whole of their childhoods in Norway have acquired a competence in Norwegian literary culture. Later books also address transnational mobility and emphasize territorial border crossings.
My examples are written by women born in Somalia but growing up partly in Norway, the 2008 novel by Roda Ahmed, Forberedelsen, and the 2009 autobiography by war orphan Amal Aden, Min drøm om frihet. In addition to immanent analysis, extended medial receptions make possible appraisals of the social actants involved.
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Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen
(2013).
Border | Aesthetics: REPORT: The final conference of the Border Aesthetics research project University of Tromsø, Tromsø. 5‐8 September 2012.
La Frontera: Association for Borderlands Studies Newsletter.
33(2),
s. 7–9.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2013).
Arctic Negotiables: The Panic of 1873 and the Archaeology of Modernity and Modernism.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2013).
Schönbrunn & Hietzing: Kulturhistorisk tur.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
En drømmedag med en forsker.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Grensenes gjenkomst.
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Grenser er på vei tilbake i den internasjonale arenaen med full fart. Det kan virke som om globaliseringsprofetenes spådommer om en grenseløs verden har mistet all betydning.
Fra Tijuana på grensen tilUSAtil Kirkenes på grensen til Russland, fra det dødsbringende havet mellom Libya og Italia til den lovlige lovløsheten på Guantanamo-basen, fra de fjernstyrte dronenes jaktmerker i det nordvestlige Pakistan til den økonomiske krisen i Hellas, fra murbyggingen på Vestbanken til forstedene i Paris: grenser forbindes med mange slags problemstillinger.
Samtidig som verden forandrer seg, forandrer våre begrep om grenser seg. Kan nye ideer om hvordan grenser er hjelpe oss i å finne alternative løsninger når det gjelder innvandring, sikkerhet, suverenitet og andre grenserelaterte spørsmål? Kan forskning, kunst og litteratur være måter å forhandle fram nye, mer levelige grensebegrep på?
Det viser seg at en måte å skape alternative grensebegrep er å lytte til hva en liten tekst som Franz Kafka skrev under første verdenskrig, ”Husfarens bekymringer”, kan ha å si til oss. Det anbefales å lese denne før samtalen.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Disorientation, Unorientation, Post-Orientation.
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When orientation comes from the outside it becomes a symbolic system, imposed by the ”Father”. Rebelling against it, we may suspect that it is inauthentic, a pseudo-orientation. False orientations can be predicated on orientation, and disorientation itself may be part of the same economy. When one discovers that one’s orientation was a pseudo-orientation, one is disorientated, and one feels a need to become reorientated.
What can break this economy? Is there an alternative to either reorientation or a repressive ”deorientation”? One such alternative may be a utopian unorientation, where one feels no need for orientation. Another is acceptation of hybrid and ambiguous orientations, a post-orientation.
The economy of orientation is part of the formation of our selves as sovereign subjects. Yet the self comes into being, as Althusser’s famous example makes clear, in a moment of disorientation, which he visualizes as a scene where one is hailed by a policeman on the street. Althusser is quick to brush over the theatricality of this scene; we already have established our identities, through the workings of ideology. But what if we acknowledge this moment of disorientation and allow for self-reflexivity from the outset?
The fictional cities of China Miéville’s The City & the City (2009) are set in an imaginary Eastern or Central Europe, in a fragmented and multilayered space characterized by displacement and disorientation. Appropriately, it is a theoretically informed novel about police work, and emphasizes the element of disorientation through the generic form of the detective story (false leads, conspiracies behind conspiraceis, etc.). It also sets up a theatre of genre through its clearly constructed disorientation of the reader’s generic expectations with the help of fantasy and science fictional elements.
Most strikingly, The City & the City reifies our everyday practices of ignoring certain things which are around us through a science fictional motif or novum, an institutionalized practice of “unseeing” the other cities around one. Paradoxically, it is the seeing which lurks behind unseeing which creates disorientation in the novel, which in turn suggests various ways of glimpsing the possibility of ambigous post-orientations.
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Görling, Reinhold & Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Sovereignty.
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Görling, Reinhold & Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Reading Kafka’s ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ as a Text about Sovereignty, Aesthetics and Borders.
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This paper reads Kafka’s short text ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ (‘The Cares of a Family Man’) as a partly allegorical text about sovereignty, aesthetics and borders. We use Kafka’s text as an entry point, opening up the field of reflection by examining its main motifs.
The main figures of the text are the fairly anonymous “Hausvater” (the family man, literally the “House-Father”) and a mysterious toy-like figure, “Odradek”. The Hausvater is by implication the sovereign of the family and the house, a bordered space, where every thing has its place and its meaning. The text tries to positions Odradek through its name which may have Slavic as well as German origins. But as uncertain as these etymologies of its name is its origin in general. For the Hausvater Odradek is a denizen of in-between spaces. It lives in the margins and on the thresholds, moving freely between the inside and the outside, disappears and reappears again. Is it like a migrant crossing the borders of the nation- house? Its interdeterminacy resist the sovereignty of the Hausvater. If the Odradek is a “Sorge” (worry, concern, care) of the Hausvater, does the Hausvater want to get rid of it or look after it? Is it an undeterminable threat? It is even uncertain if it dies.
The very form of the Odradek has unclear borders, a “flat star-shaped spool for thread” with some broken threads hanging on to it, a small wooden crossbar and a right-angled rod. Its uselessness it reminds us of the Kantian definition of beauty as being disinterested, but its melancholic aesthetic as a fragment makes sovereign have “Sorge” about it.
The Odradek is uncannily similar to the sovereign as being outside the law. What marks off the border and relationship between the sovereign – with its violent phantasm of omnipotence – and the aesthetic? Or is the aesthetic that which mockingly resists such bordering and reveals the sovereign’s fear of death?
Who is the Hausvater? Is he the narrator “I” or the generalized “one” or the text? Why these sliding subject positions in relationship to the sovereignity of the narrator and the literary fragment as a performative act?
This is not a case study of a Kafka text, but a dialogue with the text asking it what it has to contribute to a discussion of sovereignty, aesthetics and borders.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
The Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition and Expedition Doctor Gyula Kepes.
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Gramnæs, Martin & Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Språkdiskusjon utenom det vanlige.
[Avis].
Sør-Varanger Avis.
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Melodiøs folkemusikk og poetisk diskusjon stod på programmet under litteraturfestivalens første poesisalong
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Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Liminality and Borders in Literary Aesthetics.
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Writing poetics is often an exercise in distinguishing between different categories: elements in the text, parts of the text. The differences between these sometimes explicitly figured as borders and transitions (such as beginnings, plot turns and revelations). In traditional poetics, literary categories are often territorialized in a conceptual landscape and works are subjected to unities. Distinctions are also made between a range of phenomena and their others: good literature and bad literature, originals and imitations, affect and decorum, literature and history, reality and fiction, plausibility and fantasy, poetic language and prosaic language, readers/audiences and texts, the text and its outside, etc. Again, such otherings may be figured as borders of various kinds: absolute divisions, mixings, magnetisms, dialectics, etc. Within these processes of distinctions and borderings, various subject positions are being constructed: authors and their readers, critics, characters, and not least poeticians and their readers.
The purpose of this presentation is to examine, in a wide range of writings in traditional and modern poetics, possible border narratives, border figures and liminalities brought into play in such writing. The approach is broadly one taken from border poetics: the acknowledgement of border processes taking place on different surfaces which sometimes join in telling ways. In some poetics for example, relations of power surface between categories and subject positions, especially apparent in the various otherings going on in these texts. Certain categories, including literature itself, are made sovereign over others, authors exercise freedoms (e.g. deus ex machina), etc. In some, such relations are explicitly made into topographical borders, including Plato’s famous admonition to exile all practicioners of literary and aesthetic imitation from his ideal state, or Boileau’s scepticism to rhymesters ”on the other side of the Pyrenees” who in their works break with the unity of time. The question raised – in such cases most clearly – is whether a poetics can be evaluated from its confirm or challenge territorializing and ”container” concepts of borders; whether it allows for liminal states, categories and subject positions.
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Øistad, Beate Sletvold; Mortensen, Ellen; Bolsø, Agnes; Rogg, Elisabet & Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Forstå samfunnet - studer kjønn!
[Internett].
Kilden: Informasjonssenteret for kjønnsforskning.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Hva skal en litteraturviter med tegneserier, og hva sier det oss om tegneserier?
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Schimanski, Johan; Wintervold, Morten & Hallberg, Anna
(2012).
Poetisk salong: Anna Hallberg og Morten Wintervold i samtale med Johan Schimanski.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Grensens nett.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Nordpolen som mediebegivenhet i Sentraleuropa.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2012).
Grensebegreper og begrepsgrenser.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Victor Turner and the Border Fantastic.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Presentasjon av boken Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Introduction: Le Cerf-Volant.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Pronouncing it the Porder: The Ascription of Aesthetic Values to External and Internal National Borders in Frank A. Jenssen, The Salt Bin.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Border Aesthetics and Postmodernist Negotiations in the Norwegian-Russian Borderscape.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
The Disorientating Epistemology of the Border.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Reading for Borders.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2011).
Elling Carlsen og katolikkene på Nordpolen – eller Frans Josefs Land før Nansen.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2011).
Gendered Discourses of Celebration and the Formation of Arctic Heroes.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2011).
Setting the Borders of the Arctic in the Discourse of the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition 1872-1874.
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Schimanski, Johan; Pötzsch, Holger; Thuen, Inger Præsteng & Benjaminsen, Tom
(2011).
Utforsker grenser.
Avisa Tromsø.
s. 18–18.
Vis sammendrag
Grenser finnes på mange plan, og utforskes også på film. Nå får du sjansen til å se film med forskerblikk på grenseproblematikk.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2011).
Oscar II’s Lands: Receiving Austro-Hungarian Polar Explorers in Norway and Sweden in 1874.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2011).
Welcome on German Soil:: Using an Arctic Expedition to Negotiate National Identities.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Border Aesthetics and Postmodernist Negotiations in the Norwegian-Russian Borderscape.
Vis sammendrag
This paper examines the aesthetic dimension in the remaking of borders and border concepts. It explores scenes from two postmodernist novels - so-called historiographic metafictions - which negotiate the Norwegian-Russian(-Sámi-Finnish) borderscape, Fowles’ The Magus (1966) and Fløgstad’s Grense Jakobselv (2009). In doing so to changing conceptions of borders and aesthetics, the complex layering of historical memory in the Pasvik region, and the specific border figures brought into play. How does aesthetics map into internal and external borderscapes? Which aesthetic judgments about the border do these novels make possible? Can aesthetic distancing and its shifting of the visible/invisible create new, perhaps enabling conceptions of the border? Do bordering processes help create new aesthetical concepts?
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Disorientating Borders.
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At the border, disorientation may appear. I will here be examining some literary/cinematic narratives featuring national borders, developing on work on the epistemology of borders. 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 or the viewer into the screen. 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? In many of these narratives, the unknowability of the border and its other side is figured through an intrusion of the imaginary and a disorientation, with my focus here being on the latter. But to answer questions about what such narratives can tell us about community and identity – national affiliation and global interpellation as acts of reading borders – we must also ask who or what is disorientated and who does the disorientation: national, migrant or border subjects, protagonists or readers/viewers, the text/film or the border itself?
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Border Reading Double Vector: The Epistemology of Border-Crossings.
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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 border 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--national affiliation as an act of reading borders? I suggest that narratives of border crossing, like border crossings themselves, are structured spatial around a double vector, sometimes transformed into a swirling confusion of direction, constituting the border zone and its associated identities.
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Schimanski, Johan & Arntzen, Even
(2011).
Et litteraturfiendtlig UiT?
Nordlys.
ISSN 0805-5440.
s. 3–3.
Vis sammendrag
FORESLÅS NEDLAGT: Hvorfor er det så viktig å beholde allmenn litteraturvitenskap på studieprogrammet til Universitetet i Tromsø?
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Reading for Borders and Aesthetics.
Vis sammendrag
In the workshop we will be reading short texts by Dannie Abse and Yoko Tawada with border themes, looking for different ways in which they involve borders, connect different kinds of borders (national, textual etc) and create different conceptions of borders. What makes a taken border interesting in reading a text? What border crossings are involved in the reading process itself? Can aesthetical concepts help us understand the connection between the borders described in the text and the borders of the text itself?
Returns to central theoretical texts by Jacques Derrida, Benedict Anderson and Franco Moretti provide points of access. Participants will be asked to relate to use of border concepts and aesthetics in their own work. Discussion can be in English or Scandinavian, depending on the wishes of the participants.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
How National Borders are Created and Negotiated in Interaction with Narrativity, Aesthetics, and Interpretation.
Vis sammendrag
This lecture begins by presenting the borderscape as a concept which allows us to take into account aestheticization processes when addressing borders. It takes as its departure point various literary narratives which negotiate national borders, with the specific questions such borders raise about identification, history and transformation in a world of flows, joins, resistances and exclusions. The lecture aims to create a juncture in which we may pose the question of the performative force of literary borderings and of reading. Which aesthetic judgments about the border do literary texts make possible? What would it mean to deal with the aesthetic as a border phenomenon? How do aesthetical negotiations of the border relate to other fields of evaluation, such as the ontological, epistemological, emotional, ethical, political etc? In order to answer these questions the lecture handles both the border and the aesthetic as contingent concepts suggesting new possibilities, and interrogates the various ascriptions which connect borders, aesthetics, style, affect etc.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Pronouncing it the Porder: The Ascription of Aesthetic Values to External and Internal National Borders in Frank A. Jenssen, The Salt Pit.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2011).
Habsburg Colonialism and the Remedialization of Franz Joseph Land.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2011).
Border Aesthetics and Postmodernist Negotiations in the Norwegian-Russian Borderscape.
Vis sammendrag
This paper examines the aesthetic dimension in the remaking of borders and border concepts. In which way do aesthetic works and aestheticization processes become part of the borderscape?
To ask such questions is not only to interrogate different historical conceptions of the border, but also different meanings of the word “aesthetic”. The aesthetic can be about the senses: that which connects the spatial and symbolic aspects of every border is precisely the sensual perception of the border. The aesthetic can be about beauty, etc: the border allows for emotional responses (like/dislike etc) and for aesthetic judgements (beautiful, sublime, grotesque, etc). The aesthetic be about art: The border can be connected to artistic cultural production and be subjected to everyday aestheticization.
All these aspects of the border create the possibility of ascribing various aesthetic (and ethical) values to the border; however, the border not only elicits aesthetic responses, but is also renegotiated in those responses.
The paper explores scenes from two “postmodernist” novels which negotiate the Norwegian-Russian(-Sámi-Finnish-Kven) borderscape, Fowles’ The Magus (1966) and Fløgstad’s Grense Jakobselv (2009), attending to the changing conceptions of borders, the complex layering of historical memory in the Pasvik region, and the specific border metaphors they bring into play. Which aesthetic judgments about the border do these novels make possible? Can aesthetic distancing and its shifting of the visible/invisible create new, perhaps enabling conceptions of the border?
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2011).
Presentasjon av artikkelen "A Black Rectangle Labelled 'Polar Night': Imagining the Arctic after the Austro-Hungarian Expedition of 1872-1874".
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Lindstad, Siri; Schimanski, Johan; Spring, Ulrike; Wærp, Henning Howlid & Gaupseth, Silje
(2010).
Feltrapport: Til Arktis for å finne seg selv.
Forskerforum.
ISSN 0800-1715.
42(10),
s. 24–26.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2010).
The Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition in Hamburg, 1874.
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Wolfe, Stephen; Schimanski, Johan; Otte, Martha & Høtvedt, Martin
(2010).
TIFF og universitetet samarbeider om filmhøst: Inviterer til film og grensedebatt.
[Avis].
Nordlys.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2010).
Cywydd.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2010).
Truth and beauty (or not) of borders.
Vis sammendrag
While borders may seem erased by globalization, they tend to reappear, often in unexpected places. Borders are multiple traces, a form of writing we have to read. We often think of that which is on the other side of the border as something unknown, and the border itself is also in some sense unknowable, inviting interpretation. The border helps define meaning and truth, and border crossing 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. Border crossings are movements of bodies in space and the relationship between the reader’s body and the space of the text shares this sense of spatiality.
In analysing literary and cinematic (or perhaps any) narratives for elements of an epistemology of the border we are also faced however with an aesthetics of the border. Borders are often aestheticized not only as spaces of narrative conflict, but also as fantastic, romantic, comic, sublime, absurd, or grotesque. Such ascriptions of aesthetic values can help us understand what border crossing narratives tell us about the figurality of community and identity – national affiliation as an act of reading borders. The beauty and ugliness of borders are crucial elements in the politics of some of the most contentious border issues in the world today.
Here I will be examining narratives of border crossing which are structured spatially around a double vector, which is transformed into a swirling confusion of direction, constituting a border zone with its epistemology, aesthetics and associated identities.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2010).
Grenser: identitet, estetikk, verdier.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2010).
Pronouncing it the porder: The ascription of aesthetic values to external and internal national borders in Frank A. Jenssen, Saltbingen.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2010).
Pronouncing it the porder: The ascription of aesthetic values to external and internal national borders in Frank A. Jenssen, Saltbingen.
Vis sammendrag
Frank A. Jenssen’s Saltbingen (1981; translated as The Salt Pit, 1998), winner of the Vesaas prize, is a piece of often grotesque realism describing events in the life of the Tysfjord Sámi. It deals with many kinds of symbolic borders, first and foremost the social, linguistic and cultural borders between indigenous hunter-gatherer-fisher-farmers and various representatives of state and economic power, between the Tysfjord Sámi and on the one hand Lofoten fishermen and on the other reindeer-herding Sámi. As such it addresses various questions of identity, articulation and representation central to postcolonial theory; a historical novel set from 1955 onwards, it also covers two generations and follows the traces of trauma across temporal boundaries. This paper discusses how the novel loads specifically topographical borders – the border to Sweden and to the East, the borders dividing the world of daily life from submarine or subterraneous underworlds or from the more aetheric world of the mountain tops – with the aesthetics of the gothic and the idyll, and how these aesthetic values overlap with the social and cultural issues mentioned above.
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Schimanski, Johan; Määttä, Jerry & Dahl, Thomas
(2010).
Samtale om science fiction-fankultur: Skap din egen fremtid nå! Om science fiction-fans og hvordan kulturforbruk kan være kreativt.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2010).
Erfaringer med bruk av Twitter i undervisning.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2010).
Introduction to Fatih Akin, "Im Juli" (2000).
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Fatih Akin's In July (original title Im Juli) is a light summer romantic comedy and road movie about the coming-of-age of Daniel, a young maths teacher from Hamburg, played by the indispensable Moritz Bleibtrau. Daniel sets off to find his true love at the Bosporus in Istanbul, crossing national and personal borders on every step of the way through a sun-baked Europe. Scenes in this film on German and Turkish, Western and Eastern identities prove that illegal border crossings can be funny and romantic - in spite of the threat of state violence. How can border crossings be comic? Do we today need border-crossing comedy? Are comedies always about some form of border-crossing? Included in the introduction are comparisons with earlier comic treatments of border-crossing - a 1938 novel by Erich Kästner (filmed in 1943), a phrase in a 1964 poem by Ingeborg Bachmann - and with Akin's main source of inspiration, Shakespeare’s comedies. In July won the audience award at the Tromsø International Film Festival in 2001.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2010).
Grensens estetikk.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2010).
Om grenser.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan
(2010).
En polarekspedisjon vender hjem: Den østerriksk-ungarske polarekspedisjonen 1872-1874.
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Schimanski, Johan; Wolfe, Stephen & Niemi, Einar a
(2009).
Introduction: Cultural Production and Negotiation of Northern Borders.
Journal of Northern Studies.
ISSN 1654-5915.
s. 7–11.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2009).
Litteratur er viktig.
Nordlys.
ISSN 0805-5440.
108(215),
s. 3–3.
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Lindholm, Audun & Schimanski, Johan
(2009).
Fra Algernon til Aardvark: Norske science fiction-fanziner på 1970- og 80-tallet.
Vagant.
ISSN 0802-0736.
s. 8–17.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2009).
Sverige tvetydig overfor science fiction [anmeldelse av Jerry Määttä, Raketsommar. Science Fiction i Sverige 1950–1968, Lund: elleströms förlag 2006].
Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning.
ISSN 0013-0818.
96(2),
s. 191–195.
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Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen
(2009).
The ABS-Europe Biennale Kirkenes Conference Report: Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders.
La Frontera: Association for Borderlands Studies Newsletter.
29(2),
s. 10–14.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2009).
The Theoretical Basis of Border Poetics.
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Schimanski, Johan; Leikvoll, Jan Roar; Gabrielsen, Gøhril & Kollbotn, Kjersti
(2009).
Nye stemmer: Tre ferske forfattere snakker om motivasjonen for å skrive, og valg av vold som tema (paneldiskusjon).
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Schimanski, Johan
(2009).
Å krysse grenser, å forhandle mannlighet.
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Per, Næss; Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2008).
Polare helter fra det sentrale Europa.
[Avis].
Nordlys.
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Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan
(2008).
Kulturmøter: matrosene.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2008).
Presentasjon av pågående grenseforskning.
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Wærp, Henning Howlid; Ryall, Anka & Schimanski, Johan
(2008).
Leder for Nordlit 23: Arctic Discourses 2008.
Nordlit.
ISSN 0809-1668.
s. 9–9.
Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2008).
Russell A. Potter, Arctic Spectacles. The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875, Seattle & London: University of Washington Press 2007, ISBN 9780773533325, ix + 258 pp.
Journal of Northern Studies.
ISSN 1654-5915.
s. 93–97.
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Wærp, Henning Howlid; Schimanski, Johan & Ryall, Anka
(2008).
"Sammen om arktisk litteratur". Intervju om konferansen Arctic discourses 2008, Universitetet i Tromsø, 21.-23. februar, med 65 foredragsholdere fra 15 land. (Journalist: Lasse Jangås.).
[Avis].
Nordlys.
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Wærp, Henning Howlid & Schimanski, Johan
(2008).
Intervju om konferansen Arctic Discourses 2008, Universitetet i Tromsø, 21.-23. februar.
[Radio].
NRK P1, Troms og Finnmark.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2008).
Explorers’ Bodies in Arctic Mediascapes: Celebrating the Return of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition in 1874.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2008).
Exploration becoming Literature: Writing Strategies in the Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2008).
Arktiske diskurser.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2008).
Exploration becoming Literature: Writing Strategies in the Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2008).
The Theoretical Basis of Border Poetics.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2008).
Reading Borders.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2008).
Narrative Borders in Arctic Exploration Discourse: The Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition 1872-1874.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2008).
Ytterst på Vingene: Grenser i Skogheims Sulis.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2008).
Et gjensydd sår: Om Roy Jacobsens Grenser.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2008).
Popular Images and Imaginings of the Arctic in Central Europe.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2008).
Presentasjon av prosjektet Arktiske diskurser.
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Schimanski, Johan & Lachnit, Peter
(2007).
Dimensionen - Die Welt der Wissenschaft.
[Radio].
ORF - Radio Ö1.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2007).
No Borders Without Fiction.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2007).
Arctic Southerners.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2007).
Can Scandinavian Borders be Mapped? Can Literature Map Borders?
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2007).
"Die Quarneroli am Nordpol.” Österreichisch-ungarische Identitäten und arktische Fähigkeiten.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2007).
Border-crossing as Translation, Translation as Border-crossing.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2007).
Prosjektet arktiske diskurser/Mottakelse og Mottakelse.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2007).
Kjønn i filmen Fight Club.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2007).
Grensens kultur og kulturens grenser.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2007).
Kvinnen—moralens vokter i isødet?
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2007).
Tromsø—Bergen—Wien: En polarekspedisjon på veien hjem.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2006).
Prinser og havfruer i nordområdene.
Nordlys.
ISSN 0805-5440.
s. 3–3.
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Schimanski, Johan & Lachnit, Peter
(2006).
Diagonal. Zum Thema: Licht.
[Radio].
ORF - Radio Ö1.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2006).
Reception and Reception: The Returns of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition, 1872–1874.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2006).
Grensen – litterært faktum med romlig form.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2006).
Ingen litteratur uten grenser, ingen grenser uten litteratur.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2006).
The Return to the Matrixial Borderspace: Dannie Abse’s ‘The Pencil Box’.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2006).
No Borders Without Fiction.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2006).
Introduction on Borders and Literature: Possibilities and Implications.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2006).
Ingen grenser uten litteratur, ingen litteratur uten grenser.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2005).
Wien - Tromsø - Franz Josefs Land 1872-1874 og etterpå, i vitenskap, populærkultur, kunst og litteratur.
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Schimanski, Johan; Wærp, Henning Howlid; Ryall, Anka; Jangås, Lasse & Sæbbe, Yngve Olsen
(2005).
9 mill. til forskning på arktisk litteratur.
[Avis].
Nordlys.
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Schimanski, Johan; Wærp, Henning Howlid & Fermariello, Ugo
(2005).
[om arktiske diskurser].
[Radio].
NRK P2.
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Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen
(2005).
Introduction to Round Table Discussion: Borders Differences Distances.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2005).
Panel Discussion Contribution on Teaching Gender in Border Studies.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2005).
Fantastic Borderings.
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Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike
(2005).
Representasjon og resepsjon i arktisk diskurs: Den østerriksk-ungarske polarekspedisjonen, 1872-1874.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2005).
Drums of the Babongo and the Ironies of Celtic Postcolonialism.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2004).
Postcolonial Travel as Reversal.
IASLonline.
ISSN 1612-0442.
Vis sammendrag
Review of Kati Stammwitz, �Travel Writing the Empire doesn�t imply�: Studien zum postkolonialen Reisebericht [Studies on Postcolonial Travel-Writing].
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Schimanski, Johan
(2004).
[interview on Angharad Tomos].
[Radio].
BBC Radio Cymru.
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Schimanski, Johan & Elven, Inger Merete
(2004).
Om fabelprosa på Laterna Magica.
[Avis].
Bladet Vesterålen.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2004).
The Stitched Wound: The Borders of European War in Roy Jacobsen�s Grenser.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2004).
Hamsun�s Colonial Nonsense.
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Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen
(2004).
Workshop 2: Reading the opening of Heart of Darkness through border poetics.
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Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen
(2004).
Workshop 1: Border Poetics � A Project Proposal.
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Schimanski, Johan & Lang, Birgit
(2004).
Grenzgängerinnen: Transitory Borders in Contemporary German Literature.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2002).
Metodisert teori.
Norsk Litteraturvitenskapelig Tidsskrift.
ISSN 0809-2044.
5(2),
s. 179–184.
Vis sammendrag
Omtale av Johannes Fibiger, Gerd Lütken og Niels Mølgaard, red., Litteraturens tilgange – metodiske angrebsvinkler, København: Gads Forlag, 2001.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2000).
Island Horizons: Territorial/Textual Borders in Derek Walcott's 'Names'.
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Schimanski, Johan
(1999).
Vil du være kvinne igjen?
Utflukt.
ISSN 0804-9327.
1/2,
s. 74–75.
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Schimanski, Johan
(1999).
�Che Gelida Manina� in Welsh: Internal and External Cultural Translation in the Future Wales of Islwyn Ffowc Elis.
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Schimanski, Johan
(1999).
Smugling over litteraturens grenser: Canetti og grenseteorien idag.
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Schimanski, Johan & Røssaak, Eivind
(1997).
Litteraturens veiskilt.
Morgenbladet.
ISSN 0805-3847.
s. 5–5.
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Schimanski, Johan & Lindgren, Lena
(1997).
Forskjellenes fellesskap.
Klassekampen.
ISSN 0805-3839.
s. 13–13.
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Schimanski, Johan
(1997).
Hen Wraig y Bala.
Barn.
ISSN 1357-4256.
s. 414–415.
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Schimanski, Johan
(1995).
Kanon utenfra.
Bøygen: Organ for nordisk språk og litteratur.
ISSN 0806-8623.
s. 49–51.
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Schimanski, Johan & Brooks, Simon
(1993).
Wales og den post-moderne nasjonalismen.
Gateavisa.
ISSN 0802-2216.
s. 35–37.
Vis sammendrag
Intervju med Simon Brooks
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Schimanski, Johan Henrik
(2016).
Working Paper 12: Changing Borders in Published Migration Narratives in Norwegian.
EUBORDERSCAPES.
Vis sammendrag
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.
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Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen
(2005).
ENG-3105: Border Crossing Narrative og “Grensepoetikk”.
Det humanistiske fakultet, Universitetet i Tromsø.
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Liepe, Lena; Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen
(2004).
Borders and Frames / Grenser og rammer: Volumes 1-3.
Humanistisk fakultet, Universitetet i Tromsø.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2004).
Postkolonial teori: Artikler.
Det humanistiske fakultet, Universitetet i Tromsø.
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Schimanski, Johan
(2004).
Postkolonial litteratur: Dikt & noveller.
Det humanistiske fakultet, Universitetet i Tromsø.
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Schimanski, Johan
(1990).
Falskneri som pre-romantisk trope: Iolo Morganwg 1747-1826.
Universitetet i Oslo (Avdeling for allmenn litteraturvitenskap).
