The study explores and discusses the expression of authenticity and identity in relation to the use of archived material and tradition. For this purpose the study relies on multimodal discourse analysis of two works: the music video for Vargtimmen, by the band Hedningarna, as well as the video for Ramunder, by the band Garmarna. The two bands are rooted in the field of scandinavian folk music but have come to explore new and different contexts for this tradition. As such this study explores how ideology and ideals, tied to tradition, have come to be manifested or rejected in the recontextualization present in the new work as an expressed chronotope. This analysis is also grounded in interviews carried out with Totte Mattsson from Hedningarna and Stefan Brisland-Ferner from Garmarna. The analysis is as such broadened from the specific work and takes on a wider perspective, trying to identify how parts of history and tradition have come to be adapted and transformed in not only the work but also in practice. A practice that has been informed by their respective practitioners' approach to the use of history as are source. The study concludes by presenting authenticity as a sort of successfully conveyed ‘proof’ of knowledge. Knowledge regarding original context, new context as well as an understanding for the personal role in recontextualization. Identity can be said to be found in the management of that personal role.

In this essay Murakami Haruki’s novel The Wind Up Bird Chronicle was analysed from the perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope. The aim was to explore the concept of time and space as presented in the novel. In particular, the analysis focused on how Bakhtin’s chronotopes can be applied to The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, how the chronotopes can enhance our understanding of the novel, and finally how the chronotope theory can be applied to the concept of ‘magic realism’ that is often used to describe Murakami’s authorship. Four chronotopes, presented by Bachtin, were selected and applied to the novel: every-day life, the road, crisis and the castle. The concept of the chronotope allows analysis of how time and space work together in literature and how they form patterns of correlation in the sujet. Results showed that the four chronotopes were found in the novel, and that they also interacted with each other. The chronotope of everyday-life was apparent throughout the novel, and the narrator was under its control. The narrator also seemed to create every-day life out of the chronotopes of the road and crisis by re-living the crises in the road. These three chronotopes seemed inseparable in The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Finally, the fourth chronotope, the castle, illustrated how a concrete room in the novel, a house, became a part of time and space through a character who, by his presence, gave the impression of slowing down time. When this character disappeared, time made its way through space, making the chronotope of the castle visible. The essay concludes that the chronotope theory was a relevant way to analyse The Wind Up Chronicle as it provided a concept of how time and space appeared together in a novel where time and space is always present. The analysis helped creating a way of understanding the patterns in the novel, which were not always clear, thereby also increasing the understanding of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

Captured in the room of Göran Tunström’s spoken language, fenced behind his barrier of manic words. This essay is about the limit of language and world’s necessity to be spoken to be experience, about telling as a manufacturer of meaning and a subject’s motion between fiction and reality. Based on the novel Skimmer from 1996, my purpose is to identify “a linguistic room” in Tunström’s narration and show how this room is given an existential character by its temporal and spatial dimensions. The linguistic room is an abstraction of the virtual experience of a story and how this virtual room seeks to transform into reality, the same way as language tries to capture its reference by being its referent. Using Jacques Derrida’s and Roland Barthes’ structuralist ideas about language as a complex referential medium, Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope and Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological and psychoanalytic theory about the poetics of room, I examine the linguistic room as habitation for the protagonists in Tunström’s novel and how richness of language could turn into experience of insufficiency. Language giving the subject nutrition to prosper and outgrow its existence depends on its ability of making it bigger by recreating, specifying and defining experience of life. Not only living it but also verbalizing it makes the existence vaster but at the same time insufficient since the insight will come about world’s inability to be captured but only referred to by linguistic instruments. Thus this essay studies the relation between language and existence and how narration concretizes this relation into a linguistic room.

Sara Lidman’s first novel, Tjärdalen (The Tar Pit, 1953), addresses ethical issues in a remote village in the north of Sweden. This essay discusses the novel’s narrative technique and the ethical aspects implied by the narration and aesthetic design. The approach is based on Adam Zachary Newton’s narrative ethics, which links narrative theory and method with an ethical perspective. Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory and Gérhard Genette’s concept of focalization are starting points for the analysis. The ethical framework is drawn both from Bakhtin and from philosophers Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. This means that responsibility is a more important concept than the collective and individual guilt that has been the focus of some interpretations of the novel. Furthermore, in the essay, the concept of dialogue is both a narrative technique and an ethical position, thus knitting together the different parts of the essay: how ideas, voices, faces and eyes meet and how the village interacts with the outside world. Tjärdalen’s design opens to a polyphonic analysis and the essay examines how the text’s ethical and intersubjective emphasis grows out of the composition – out of the arrangement of scenes and viewpoints. The dialogue between multiple voices continues in the representation of the characters’ inner life. Petrus’ character is constructed as open and questioning, inviting discussion, persuading and arguing rather than dictating. In the essay this way of life is defined as dialogic, as opposed to the monologic positions of characters like Blom and Albert. The essay finds, however, that the strong position of the narrator dilutes the polyphonic pattern. The examination of the narrator explores both her loyalties and the attitudes and worldviews that she rejects. Particular emphasis is placed on the analysis of Jonas’ character, as the plot starts and ends with his eyes. The symbolism of the eyes and of the face forms a parallel structure in the text, giving the ethical discussion a depth not achieved by rational dialogue and reflection. In the essay, this level is interpreted by Levinas’ ethics, where the face and the eyes represent a call to responsibility. At the end of Tjärdalen, the ethical questions are transferred to the wider society outside the village. The analysis explores two lines in this shift: One is how the spatial organisation of the narrative and the unchanging quality of the village life leads to a circular composition. The other is how the text brings social criticism back to its origin in interpersonal relationships: to meetings face to face and to the responsibility for the “other” that, according to Levinas, Buber and Bakhtin, is the basis of these encounters.

What’s Hiding in the Woods of the Swedish North? – About nature, humans, and exoticism in three contemporary northern Swedish novels – This essay aims at exploring the use of nature and the supernatural in contemporary northern Swedish literature, in the light of the long historical exploitation of the area and the conflicts this caused. The novels that are being examined are Stallo by Stefan spjut, Glupahungern by Andrea Lundgren and Ett föremåls berättelse om obesvar by Mikael Berglund. The essay is underpinned, first and foremost, by theories of ecocritisism and postcolonial ecocritisism in order to explore the relations between humans and environment. In addition to this, theories of time-space relations and movement as well as theories of human-animal relationships and transformations are used. The analysis focuses on movement in time-space, the relationship between bear and child, and human-bear and troll-bear transformations in the novels. The different paths that are chosen by the characters in the novels reveal varying ways in which humans relate to nature, and as a result also relations to, and ideas about, the Swedish north. For example, the nomadic people in Ett föremåls berättelse om obesvar moves according to seasonal change, while the crowns men from the south establish their settlements close to the natural resources they are exploiting, in this case silver, and adjust nature to their own needs. These relationships are also made visible in relation to the non-human animals as well as non-human animal transformations in the novels: for example the troll-bear transformations in Stallo elaborates the idea of northern Sweden as a wilderness, whilst Glupahungern rather use this idea of northern Sweden in order to criticise the anthropocentric norm. In conclusion, all three novels relate in different ways to the history of, and ideas about, the Swedish north, which in turn are closely connected to stories about nature and the supernatural. The novels display a critical relationship towards historical events, as well as present day ideas and approaches to northern Sweden, nature and animals.

I den här uppsatsen undersöker jag platsens betydelse och funktion i Stina Aronsons Feberboken. Genom en närläsning med ekokritisk ingång gör jag en tematisk undersökning av de platser där Hugo och Mimmi är fysiskt närvarande samtidigt; vistelsen i Paris och barndomshemmet. Min slutsats är att platsen fyller en funktion som bidrar med mening i Feberboken, den är inte bara en kuliss. Jag finner en skillnad i hur natur respektive kultur skildras. Naturen är en öppen plats som möjliggör och symboliserar förändring medan kulturen (staden och hemmet) beskrivs som instängda och kvävande. Samtliga platser i min undersökning kan ses som kronotoper där tiden fäster i rummet.

<p>With a hermeneutical method using narratology this thesis is interpreting the auteure Lars von Trier´s discussed movie <em>Antichrist</em>. On one hand within the limits of the hermeneutic Paul Riceours analysis of structure is used to reconstruct the narrative of the film out of the different part of discourses that I have construed in my first reading to find out a deeper comprehension of the relation between the characters and their relations to the different discourses. On the other hand the discourses which extracts out of His and Hers actions and statements are related to the clues that I´ve found out from interviews with von Trier regarding <em>Antichrist</em> where he, among other things, touches upon philosophical work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his own disregard about protestantism and religion. All in all this first phase of interpretation is termed the different horizons which I finally interprete and coalesce with my subjects comprehension on a metadiegetic and meta-metadiegetic level. By this a ”fusion of horizons” in the sense of Hans-Georg Gadamer can take place, which directly leads into the big scene of Relevations. But ”Chaos reigns” in von Triers <em>Antichrist </em>as well as Nietzsches philosophy.</p>

With a hermeneutical method using narratology this thesis is interpreting the auteure Lars von Trier´s discussed movie Antichrist. On one hand within the limits of the hermeneutic Paul Riceours analysis of structure is used to reconstruct the narrative of the film out of the different part of discourses that I have construed in my first reading to find out a deeper comprehension of the relation between the characters and their relations to the different discourses. On the other hand the discourses which extracts out of His and Hers actions and statements are related to the clues that I´ve found out from interviews with von Trier regarding Antichrist where he, among other things, touches upon philosophical work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his own disregard about protestantism and religion. All in all this first phase of interpretation is termed the different horizons which I finally interprete and coalesce with my subjects comprehension on a metadiegetic and meta-metadiegetic level. By this a ”fusion of horizons” in the sense of Hans-Georg Gadamer can take place, which directly leads into the big scene of Relevations. But ”Chaos reigns” in von Triers Antichrist as well as Nietzsches philosophy.

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This essay consists of an inquiry into the concepts of “time” and “movement” in Hjalmar Söderberg’s second novel, Martin Bircks ungdom, as well as a discussion of what the consequences of this inquiry are with regards to genre. The analysis is based on close reading, an adaptation of Michail Bachtin’s concept of the “chronotope” and, to a lesser extent, the narratological work of Gérard Genette. Through the analysis an interpretation of the novel is formed. This interpretation is then related to genre theory, especially that of Bachtin and Tommy Olofsson. In the discussion of genre, the results of the textual analysis are found to corroborate the hypothesis that Bachtin’s “novel of experience” is the category and tradition that Martin Bircks ungdom should be placed into.