The Art of Self-Defense: Diary, Memory, and the Subject.

In his "On the Concept of History," Walter Benjamin asks what memory can mean at "a moment of danger." Suggesting that we all are at such a moment of danger today, I discuss what role and function literary memory can play or fulfill in an age marked by right-wing extremism, climate change, authorita...

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Publicado en:Scandinavian Studies Vol. 96; no. 2; pp. 5 - 28
Autor principal: Olsson, Ulf
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: University of Wisconsin Press 2024
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: The Art of Self-Defense: Diary, Memory, and the Subject.
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        au: Olsson, Ulf
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        Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940
        Memory
        Right-wing extremism
        Literary form
        Self-defense
        Authoritarianism
        Conceptual history
        Recollection (Psychology)
        Collective memory
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          Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940
          Memory
          Right-wing extremism
          Literary form
          Self-defense
          Authoritarianism
          Conceptual history
          Recollection (Psychology)
          Collective memory
      keyword:
        Åsa Linderborg
        diary
        Lars Norén
        literary memory
        subject
        Ulf Lundell
      ab: In his "On the Concept of History," Walter Benjamin asks what memory can mean at "a moment of danger." Suggesting that we all are at such a moment of danger today, I discuss what role and function literary memory can play or fulfill in an age marked by right-wing extremism, climate change, authoritarian governments, as that age in its complexity is represented in three contemporary, but different, Swedish literary diaries by Lars Norén, Ulf Lundell, and Åsa Linderborg. In these works, each author claims to have become homeless, and that the world surrounding the writing subject has become threatening, but also generating acts of remembrance of the past. The three writers construe differing subject positions to make memory possible. Memory can further be related to class and gender, and it can be divided into personal or subjective as well as cultural or social memories. Aiming to understand what their respective memory work entails, I discuss the diary as a "memory machine," and what the social dangers that these writers risk confronting could mean, and whether literature in the form of diaries can turn into a defense against cumulative moments of danger. And what role does the act of forgetting play? The memory work in the three diaries seemingly focuses the individual in an act of self-representation, and one must further ask if these representations are also intended as a defense of self and subject.
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