1st Edition
The Aesthetics and Politics of Linguistic Borders Multilingualism in Northern European Literature
This collection showcases a multivalent approach to the study of literary multilingualism, embodied in contemporary Nordic literature. While previous approaches to literary multilingualism have tended to take a textual or authorship focus, this book advocates for a theoretical perspective which reflects the multiplicity of languages in use in contemporary literature emerging from increased globalization and transnational interaction. Drawing on a multimodal range of examples from contemporary Nordic literature, these eighteen chapters illustrate the ways in which multilingualism is dynamic rather than fixed, resulting from the interactions between authors, texts, and readers as well as between literary and socio-political institutions. The book highlights the processes by which borders are formed within the production, circulation, and reception of literature and in turn, the impact of these borders on issues around cultural, linguistic, and national belonging. Introducing an innovative approach to the study of multilingualism in literature, this collection will be of particular interest to students and researchers in literary studies, cultural studies, and multilingualism.
Acknowledgements
Part I. Introduction
1. Introduction: The processes and practices of multilingualism in literature
Ralf Kauranen, Markus Huss & Heidi Grönstrand
Part II. Multilingualism as a challenge to national borders
2. Follow the translations! The transnational circulation of Hassan Blasim’s short stories
Olli Löytty
3. Broken lineages, impossible affiliations: The Russian Baltic subject in Andrei Ivanov’s "Zola" and Peotäis põrmu
Eneken Laanes
4. De-bordering comics culture: Multilingual publishing in the Finnish field of comics
Ralf Kauranen
5. The multilingual landscape of Sámi literature: Linguistic and cultural border crossing in the work of Sigbjørn Skåden
Kaisa Ahvenjärvi
6. Kjartan Fløgstad’s Pampa Unión: A travel on the border of languages in Latin America
Anne Karine Kleveland
7. Humour and shifting language borders in Umayya Abu-Hanna’s auto-fictional novel Sinut
Heidi Grönstrand
8. An author’s view: To be a bridge between cultures
Zinaida Lindén
9. The pilot’s son (short story)
Zinaida Lindén
Part III. Multilingualism as problematization of language
10. Language play and politics in contemporary Swedish hip-hop
Karin Nykvist
11. "Conversations in misspelled English": Partial comprehension and linguistic borderlands in Tomas Tranströmer’s Östersjöar. En dikt (Baltics)
Markus Huss
12. Transcending borders through multilingual intertextuality in Ville Tietäväinen’s graphic novel Näkymättömät kädet
Aura Nikkilä
13. Multilingualism and the work of readers: Processes of linguistic bordering in three cases of contemporary Swedish language literature
Julia Tidigs
14. "So let me remain a stranger": Multilingualism and biscriptalism in the works of Finland-Swedish writer Tito Colliander
Helena Bodin
15. Urbanized folk life: Multilingual slang, gender and new voices in Finnish literature
Kukku Melkas
16. The permeable border: Anxieties of the mother tongue in contemporary Nordic poetry
Elisabeth Friis
17. The small mysteries of code-switching: A practitioner’s views on comics and multilingualism
Interview with Mika Lietzén by Ralf Kauranen
18. 1917 – Libau (comics short story)
Mika Lietzén
List of contributors
Biography
Heidi Grönstrand is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Slavic and Baltic languages, Finnish, Dutch and German at Stockholm University. She has published on literary multilingualism and language ideologies in a variety of journals and edited books. In 2014– 2017, she led the research group Multilingualism in Contemporary Literature in Finland.
Markus Huss is Assistant professor of German at the Department of Slavic and Baltic languages, Finnish, Dutch and German at Stockholm University. He has published on literary multilingualism, intermediality and multimodality, the relationship between historiography and literature, German and Swedish postwar literature and exile literature.
Ralf Kauranen is a sociologist and comics scholar based at the Department of Finnish Literature at University of Turku. He has written on Finnish comics culture from different perspectives, political cartoons, transnationalism, and social class. In 2018-2020 he leads the project "Comics and Migration: Belonging, Narration, Activism" (migrationcomics.fi).
