Reading and analysis of representative works. Topics vary from semester to semester; see departmental announcement for description.

Literature’s abilities to adjust the scale of its language effects from narrow to wide, to juxtapose the near and the far, to both include and surreptitiously exclude, make it easy to think of the ways a text can work like a map. Similarly, geographic notions of scale have been applied to the mix of individual, local, national, regional, and global imaginations that make up literary activity in different times and places, including the “scale-jumping” that is increasingly characteristic of contemporary literature. In the Northern tier of Europe, literary cultures have engaged with questions of scale whenever imagining nation or the relationship between (small) peripheries and (large) centers, when thinking regionally, or when juxtaposing the local with the global. What can posing questions about shifts in literature’s scalar strategies over time teach us about Nordic literature’s role in mediating social changes in the geographic imagination? This seminar will offer readings geocritical literary theory that will help us to think about questions of literary scale, as well as readings of exemplary Scandinavian primary texts (available in both the original languages and in translation). The seminar will be conducted in English. Readings will include: Malmio, Kristina and Kaisa Kurikka, eds. (2020). Contemporary Nordic Literature and Spatiality. Tally, Robert T., ed. (2017). The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space. Tally, Robert T. (2018). Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination Westphal, Bertrand (2007). Geocriticsm: Real and Fictional Spaces

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