While the influence of the film medium on modernist literature has been well established along with the increase of intermediality studies, and although the new generation of Swedish authors in the 1930s expressed fascination for the moving pictures, the interrelation between film and literature within the Swedish literary context has gained surprisingly little scholarly attention. On that account, this study sets out to explore the early 1930s prose works of Erik Asklund and Josef Kjellgren, in relation to a film movement particularly admired by them and their Swedish contemporaries – namely, the Soviet montage cinema. Using a broad semiotic and narratological discourse, as well as incorporating the theoretical writings of Soviet filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the study examines thematic and formal traits within the novels from an intermedial perspective. The aim is to formulate to what extent, and by which media specific means, the authors allude to and ‘imitate’ the characteristics of said film movement. Central to this discussion is the concept of iconicity – a phenomenon that, when present in literature, may function to modify the conventional semiotic ‘modes’ of the printed literary text, consequently creating a production of meaning that resembles that of the film medium. The results show that the authors’ respective prose works indeed employ medial and artistic conventions of the Soviet montage cinema, yet with different techniques and outcomes. Whereas Asklund, by way of experimenting with the signifying practices accessible to the prose genre, can be said to bring about a ‘film-like’ perception, Kjellgren – while showing distinct similarities to the Soviet cinema on a thematic level – does not to the same degree alter the customary semiotic constituents of the literary text. On the whole, the study contributes to a new and nuanced perspective on Swedish modernist literature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-137353 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Klingborg, Johan |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för kultur och estetik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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