Reception Studies and the History of the Book. Interdisciplinary perspectives
3rd annual seminar at the University of Oslo
1–2 December 2022
Abstracts
KEYNOTE ADDRESS, THURSDAY 1 DECEMBER
Simon Frost (Bournemouth University) – “Reading and Wanting. A collocation for literary studies and economics”
The trade in readers’ desires mediated through bookish objects might suggest a new collocation for reading. As dictation was to reading for scribal culture of the European Middle-ages, and writing is to reading for the literacy of modern literary culture, might not ‘wanting’ be a more descriptive term for our global commodity culture of the later 19th Century onward? A case study could test this proposition and allow consequences to be followed. Around 1900s, in the port of Southampton, England, the city’s bookshops, with their combinations of libraries, haberdashery, stationery, glassware and books, sustained and were sustained by the dreams of ordinary readers. Those readers’ reading preferences reflected the pain, love and boredom of their dreams, as they fantasied about escaping to Argentina or Canada, or simply about fairly-paid employment. Together, their wants, both tangible and intangible, created the values powering this market. But if we think about value creation and extraction, where does that lead? Literary studies talk of value in terms of literary qualities and accumulated cultural capitals; economics talks of goods and their consumption; each discipline keeping to their own. But for the goods of the high-street book market, those two discourses no longer back away from each other in perpetual suspicion. Because, along with much else on the High Street, the goods on sale are symbolic goods that trade in readers’ desire; their values created by and between (other) readers, (other) texts, and (other) large social forces, often in happy disobedience to either the laws of neo-classical economics or literary prescription. Most crucially, the values of the book market cannot be ‘consumed’: instead, they are ‘read’ and in doing so rightly demonstrate how economics is no longer capable of modelling this market. Given the global spread of such reader-created social markets, today – one is tempted to say its ‘political economy’ –would it be fair to suggest that economics can no-longer model the world's branded economy? Drawing on an historical monograph study of bookselling and reading (Reading, Wanting and Broken Economics: 2021), this paper argues the imperative of a new combined model of cultural-economic behaviour, free from the contorting damage of neoliberalism’s so-called free trade.
After a career in publishing, translation and arts, Simon Frost received his Phd from Aarhus University in 2006, to take up a post in English Literature at Bournemouth University in 2012. A senior commissioning editor for Oxford UP OREL (Oxford Research Encyclopaedia: Literature), Simon is also an editorial board member for several international book series. He has published with Johns Hopkins, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Wiley-Blackwell, Chadwyck-Healey, for publishers in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland and South Africa, and has presented research worldwide, incl. at Harvard and Oxford. His previous monograph, Business of the Novel, was reviewed in the TLS, and his current monograph, Reading, Wanting and Broken Economics was published by SUNY Press in 2021 to widespread endorsement. Simon was, for nearly a decade, Executive Board member and Director of Transnational Affairs for SHARP, the Society for the History of Authorship Reading and Publishing.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS, FRIDAY 2 DECEMBER
Hannah M. Strømmen (Lund University) – “Overcoming Interpretosis: Directions in Biblical Reception”
Scholars of biblical reception are interested in the use, influence and impact of biblical texts in particular times and over time. Reflecting the disciplinary comfort zone of most biblical scholars schooled in ancient history, though, many studies focus on inner-biblical reception (Hebrew Bible references in the New Testament, or Gospel receptions of earlier Gospels) or on ancient reception (the first three centuries CE). When venturing into modern territory, biblical reception is frequently centred on interpretations of a particular biblical story or character in different periods (antiquity, Middle Ages, Reformation, Enlightenment, modernity, postmodernity). I argue – with the help of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – that biblical reception needs to be less bibliocentric, and far less text-centred and book-focused. Due to an intensified interest in Deleuze and Guattari in recent years, all manner of things have been dubbed an ‘assemblage’. It was perhaps only a matter of time before Bibles, as I propose, also should be seen as an ‘assemblage’. But what I suggest the assemblage concept does is to help to overcome what Deleuze has called ‘interpretosis’. Reception cannot be only the study of histories of interpretations, where interpretations are explicit, conscious, and to be found in likely places. Reception might be better focused on use, rather than interpretation, on function and effect, rather than content and meaning. The types of attachment and the conditions of emergence that enable forms of Bible-use to gain traction, need to be analysed in order to map the stabilization of dominant trends, and indicate the tendencies to change that lead to more minority uses emerging.
Hannah M. Strømmen is Wallenberg Academy Fellow at Lund University, Sweden, where she runs a multidisciplinary project on the reception of the Bible in the history of ideas about Europe. She was previously Reader in Biblical Studies at the University of Chichester, UK. Her research focuses on contemporary uses and interpretations of the Bible in philosophy, literature and politics, and she has published widely in these areas. Her first monograph was on Jacques Derrida and the Bible (Biblical Animality after Jacques Derrida, 2018), and she is currently writing a monograph on the Bible and the contemporary European far right, drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Her latest book, co-written with Ulrich Schmiedel, was The Claim to Christianity: Responding to the Far Right (2020).
PAPERS, THURSDAY 1 DECEMBER
Anne Birgitte Rønning (University of Oslo) – “Robinson Crusoe in Norwegian: a classic in various appearance”
The first Norwegian publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1839, and since then there has been at least 40 different translations to Norwegian (Danish, bokmål and nynorsk), many in several editions.
Only a few of them are full translations, many are abridged versions, and many adapted for children. Is it still possible to recognize an «essential Robinson Crusoe»? What are the key elements in that case – the shipwreck, the island or Friday? I will briefly present the corpus, using book history and digital humanities approaches, and then discuss if there is a core in the material, or if every epoch and every translator creates a Robinson of their own.
Sissel Furuseth (University of Oslo) – “Writing Energy History Through Thick Reception Studies: U. Sinclair’s Oil! in 1920s Scandinavian Press”
Literary history, media history, energy history, and a number of other histories are linked in complex ways, not necessarily synchronised although they often converge through shared events. With the expansion of digital newspaper archives the possibilities for researching converging histories and their interconnectedness are countless, and the methodological approaches likewise. As a sequel to my paper “Traveling Petromodernities” presented at the 1stOslo Workshop on Reception Studies and the History of the Book (2020), which was empirically focused on the Norwegian reception of Upton Sinclair’s 1926 novel Oil!, this presentation will address some theoretical and methodological issues deriving from my encounter with the archive. Most importantly, how are we making the literary and the non-literary being “each other’s thick description” (to quote Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Touch of the Real”), and in what ways can and should the publication of a novel serve as a historical node?
Thorbjørn Nordbø (University of Oslo) – “Machiavelli on index – nine strategies for publishing forbidden books”
Machiavelli’s oeuvre was placed on Index librorum prohibitorum in 1557/1559 – where it was to remain. Working with editions of the author’s works before 1820 I am, however, baffled by the staggering amount of research material. So far, I have identified nine different publishing strategies for circumventing the ban. Four of these strategies are quiet obvious: (1) manuscript publication, (2) publication in another country, (3) expurgation, and (4) rename the author/book. The remaining strategies, however, are rather curious: (5) publish in Utopia, (6) a fictitious year of publication, (7) reedit the book as a dictionary, (8) print the text as a paratext in a book that attacks it, and (9) christen the author post-mortem. In the paper, I intend to explore these strategies and deduce some principles about how the publishing industry worked in relation to the Index. To make the nine strategies outlined above an even dozen, I hope for suggestions about other possible strategies for publishing forbidden books.
Kamilla Aslaksen (Inland Norway University College) – “Judging a book by its cover. Paratexts as a source to transnational studies of K. Hamsun’s books”
My presentation will have as a point of departure objects from Knut Hamsun’s left behind book collection of 6000+ volumes which I curated and catalogued between 2020 and 2022. One part of the collection consists of translations of Hamsun’s own books, published around the world, and in this paper I will focus on a selection of book covers of Hamsun’s books published in different countries and languages. The covers are often designed by un-known artists, and most of them are rare, as (public) libraries tend to tear the covers off and rebind the books. The selection shows the diversity in how Hamsun was interpreted and represented by his mediators abroad. I will go into more depth about the cover of one book, the 1921 A.A. Knopf-edition of Hunger (Sult 1890). This cover design, composed of only texts and no illustrations, testifies to how Hunger was sold into the American book marked at the time, and raises questions about how the publisher’s choice of paratexts might have impacted the Hamsun-reception in the US.
Giuliano D’Amico (University of Oslo) – “Ragna Nielsen’s séance diaries: spiritualism, book history and the Modern Breakthrough”
Ragna Nielsen (1845–1924) was a Norwegian pedagogist, women’s rights activist and spiritualist who held weekly séances in her home in Oslo between 1913 and 1923. In these séances, Nielsen claimed that her medium communicated through automatic writing with a number of personalities of the Modern Breakthrough. Among others, Nielsen contacted the spirits of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Aasta Hansteen, Ragnhild Jølsen, Amalie Skram, Ivar Aasen and Søren Kierkegaard. The automatic messages from the spirits were then transcribed by Nielsen and her medium and organized in a series of books of séances, which are now kept at the National Library of Norway. In my paper I will present an ongoing research project on Nielsen’s séances, which, drawing upon the field of hauntology, will show the dynamics and the significance of Nielsen’s reconstruction of the vanished Modern Breakthrough in her own living room. Within this context, the paper will also address the problematic nature of the séance books for a book historical approach to the project. Balancing between a private and semi-public sphere, these books appear as slippery categories when trying to assess their status and relevance for a modern breakthrough ghostly revival.
PAPERS, FRIDAY 2 NOVEMBER
Aina Nøding (National Library of Norway) – “Made Abroad. Producing Norwegian Literature in a Time of Rupture, 1900–1950”
The National Library of Norway was recently granted funding for a research project on the production, reception and dissemination of Norwegian literature abroad between 1900 and 1950. After Ibsen and Bjørnson had opened the global literary market to Norwegian authors, the road map to international success changed substantially. Authors increasingly depended on literary agents to navigate a new world of international copyright and publishing, and new visual media. Two world wars and the impact of Nazism, followed by the rising dominance of the Anglo-American book market and the English language, were game changers. How the works of Undset's and Hamsun's generations were made (or failed to become) world literature has never been studied comprehensively. An international and interdisciplinary team of scholars in book and media history will attempt to do so, starting in 2023. This presentation will outline the material, aims, methods, organization and planned outcomes of the project.
Janicke S. Kaasa – (Oslo Metropolitan University) “Sigrid Undset in the US: Return to the Future”
During her exile in the US 1940–1945, Sigrid Undset wrote several works aimed at an English-speaking readership. One of these works was the polemical travelogue Return to the Future, translated from the Norwegian by Henriette C.K. Naeseth, and first published in English by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1942. It appeared in Portuguese (Pan-Americana, Rio de Janeiro) that same year; in 1943, it appeared in Swedish (P.A. Norstedt & söner, Stockholm), German (Europaverlag, Zürich) and, illegally, Danish (Studenternes Efterretningstjeneste); in 1944, it appeared in French (Jean Marguerat, Lausanne) and Icelandic (Vikings utgáfan, Reykjavik). It was not made available to Norwegian reader until 1949 (Tilbake til fremtiden, Aschehoug), which makes Return to the Future an interesting case through which we may explore the international publishing history and reception of Undset’s works. In this paper, I investigate further this publishing and reception history of Undet’s travelogue specifically.
Iris Muñiz (Østfold University College) – “Dance as reception? Reconstructing a Modernist ballet version of Peer Gynt from archival sources”
The self-termed “exotic” dancer Carmen Tórtola Valencia (1882-1955) toured European and American theatres in the 1910s and 1920s with a risqué variety show, which sometimes included her choreographed version of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite n.2. This was probably one of the earliest dance versions of a Henrik Ibsen play, and it has never been included in any study of Ibsen European reception. In this presentation, I provide an account of how those various sources found in diverse archives may be used to reconstruct that dance show. In addition to a handful of reviews and interviews published in newspapers and cultural journals (the earliest are from 1911), some of them with pictures, there are other sources that come to use. Luckily, Tórtola Valencia left a bilingual (Spanish and English) dance journal which includes her own reflections when choreographing and dancing Peer Gynt. In addition, she was the muse of some prominent Modernist-Decadent Spanish poets, and a besotted, lyrical retelling of her dancing talents, with some oblique references to the characters she portrayed, is another useful source that may be employed. All in all, it constitutes an interesting example of how Reception and Book history sometimes goes beyond the written word.
Linnea Buerskogen (University of Oslo) – Analyzing shifts in affect in the English translations of A Doll’s House
In this paper I will introduce my PhD-project where I am studying translational shifts in Henrik Ibsen’s twelve modern dramas. I will present some preliminary findings from A Doll’s House, in ten digitally available translations spanning from 1880 to 1990. The focus is mainly on shifts in the translation of affective parts of the drama, expressed through stage directions and in the dialogues. Is there a pattern in how affect has been translated, or do the shifts vary over the 110 years of translations of A Doll’s House? I hope to get some feedback on the way I define and categorize affect, as well as on my methods on analyzing and comparing the different translations and on my project in general.
Thor Holt (University of Oslo) - Repurposing Grieg against Nazism in Fritz Lang’s M
Fritz Lang’s M (1931) sees Beckert whistle “In the Hall of the Mountain King” when sieged by an urge to kill children. Among the extensive research on Lang’s first sound film, no study has fleshed out the full political implication of this musical appropriation. When Hitler came to power a year and a half after the film’s premiere, Ibsen’s Peer Gyntturned into a national epos and Grieg’s score became a soundtrack to the Third Reich—played and performed at Nazi holidays and Hitler’s birthdays. I argue that the afterlife of M had a subversive effect in the face of National Socialism. The paper draws on what German musicologist Berthold Hoeckner calls double projection, as the external projection of Nazi versions of Peer Gynt brought up memories of Lang’s “Jewish” child murderer by means of an (in)voluntary internal projection. This intertextual layering illustrates how sound has the capacity of altering reception by means of a palimpsest with striking discursive and emotional effects.