It’s all about class
Föreställningar om arbete och handel hos Dickens, Zola och i skandinavisk prosa 1930–1949 [Ideas about work and trade in Dickens, Zola and Scandinavian novels 1930-1949]
This project deals with literature and class and its main purpose is to expand the understanding of how different classes’ self-images and views of other classes are produced and reproduced in literature through studies of work and trade as literary motives in novels by Dickens and Zola, and in about 30 Scandinavian novels from 1930–1949. From all three countries, the novels examined include working class novels as well as bourgeoisie novels. Methodologically, the project will combine phenomenology and the rhetoric of fictionality (Walsh) to bridge the divide between close reading on the one hand and ideologically critical perspectives on the other. The project deals with art as technique (Sklovskij) but also with ideology as technique, in combination with the literary text as a communicative act (Walsh).
Participant
Anna Forssberg, Senior Lecturer, Comparative Literature