By order of appearance:

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen

Words and Violence. Literary Intellectuals Between Democracy and Dictatorship 1933-1952. Overview and preliminary results.

“Words and Violence” is a large-scale research project analysing the democratic resilience and vulnerability of cultural life in the 1930s and ’40s, using both statistical and qualitative approaches. In this lecture, Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen will present the key theoretical presuppositions, research design and preliminary results from the project.  

The Words and Violence-group examines the history of the Norwegian literary field, spanning from the so called “culture wars” of the 1930s concerning immigration, race, and gender, to the Nazification and resistance during the occupation years, and the subsequent purges and legal reckoning connected with the reestablishment of democracy. The Norwegian experience is compared with that of other countries under fascist occupation during World War II.

In retrospect, the occupation years from 1940 to 45 represent something of a natural experiment for the sociology of culture. In liberal societies, like interwar Norway, literature and other arts typically enjoy a unique autonomy, which was lost overnight with the German invasion. How did the literary community respond to this upheaval? What motivated writers and intellectuals to make the choices they did when confronted with a fascist regime that enforced censorship and terror, yet also prioritized and allocated resources to the cultural sector?

The aim is to produce solid knowledge about historical issues that are hotly debated and of obvious contemporary relevance, but that are rarely researched in a systematic way.

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen is professor of intellectual history, Nord University, Bodø Norway.  He is a former Henrik Steffens Professor of the department for Northern European Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany.

Anders Engberg-Pedersen

Inventing WWIII. Ideology, Warfare, and the Securitization of the Novel

Since 2015, two influential American authors and military consultants have sought to leverage imaginative literature for the cause of national security. On the basis of concepts such as “useful fiction” and “FICINT,” a shorthand for “fictional intelligence,” they have sought to develop a new genre, which blends non-fictional research and predictive threat scenarios with the creative inventions and emotional appeal of fiction. In this talk, I trace how the national security novel arose through a process of securitization, which has gradually merged the realm of literature with that of policy and military strategy, and I assess the genre’s ideological underpinnings as well as

their current and future impact on national and global security.

Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Director of Nordic Humanities Center – University of Copenhagen and University of Southern Denmark. Professor of Comparative Literature – University of Southern Denmark. Chair of Humanities at the Danish Institute of Advanced Study.

Alan Finlayson

A Hero’s Journey? Ideological Entrepreneurs and Reactionary Digital Politics 

On digital platforms a distinct form of reactionary political ideology has crystallised around hostility to ‘liberal’ egalitarianism, denunciations of contemporary culture and calls for a return to ‘natural’ hierarchies. It draws on long-standing themes in reactionary, conservative and far-right politics but reshapes and reorganises them in particular ways, inviting followers to experience themselves as a particular kind of heroic political saviour.

In the first part of this presentation, I explain what ‘reactionary digital politics’ is, outlining the key claims and arguments around which it is built: that a natural socio-economic hierarchy (of sex, race and individual talent) is being undermined by ‘liberal’ politics; that this necessarily leads to a concentration of state power; that traditional religious, political and cultural groups are being aggressively victimised.

In the second part of the talk, I explain that key avatars of this politics are online ‘ideological entrepreneurs’. These are individuals who, untethered from modern political and journalistic institutions, are able to make a living from the business of manufacturing partisan political analysis and critique. Their political rhetoric is adapted to – and shaped by – the political economy and the affordances of digital media. Ideological entrepreneurs excel at decontextualising and recontextualising political and media events, so as to ‘explain’ them. Their rhetoric is thus centred on the revelation of ‘secrets’ and exposure of ‘the truth’ of ‘what’s really going on’, representing specific events as examples of a wider and deeper political strategy to undermine natural and traditional orders, and to intensify means of dominating individuals’ bodies and minds. Through this discourse reactionary ideological entrepreneurs cultivate a form of charismatic authority; followers are promised liberation, empowerment and even salvation if they accept the truth and take part in resistance, becoming heroes and saviours of the counter-revolution.

In the third part of the talk, I show how one element of this reactionary digital politics is a critique of media culture for failing to abide by the rules of the “hero’s journey” – as outlined by Joseph Campbell – and for refusing to tell stories which communicate what are imagined to be deeper moral and spiritual truths. Followers are urged not only to protest about this, however, but to make the hero’s journey a reality in their own life. They are thus oriented to politics in a very particular way: as (male) heroes who must identify and point out the enemies around them, cultivate the capacity to endure the trials imposed on them and so emerge as transformed individuals, connected to transcendent truths. The Manichean, sectarian and violent politics to which this gives rise is all too apparent.

Alan Finlayson is professor of Political & Social Theory, School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies. University of East Anglia.

Tanja Ellingsen.

From Fascism to Traditionalism: The Legacy of Interwar Intellectuals and the New Far Right

Far right groups and parties has become increasingly visible in both Europe and the United States the last decade. The web of ties between these groups and Russia has also come more to the surface as a result of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The year 2024 and the number of upcoming elections, is by many seen as a possible turning-point within history. Similarities and parallels to the interwar period and the growth of fascism (and Nazism) are frequently commented upon both in popular media and within academic circles. This paper argues that the current wave of far right extremists is anchored in many of the same intellectuals as the fascists and national socialists in the 1920-30s. However while Fascism and Nazism adapted their intellectuals to a more biological racist and nation-state framework,  the New Far Right return to what they describe as “traditional values”. Interwar intellectuals such as the Italian philosopher Julius Evola is oftentimes referred to as a fascist thinker. However both Evola and the French philosopher René Guénon (who converted to Islam) were actually the founders of Traditionalism which both Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin have officially stated their admiration of and where Russia is seen as a bastion of traditionalism. Culture wars, focusing on issues such as feminism, homosexuality or transgender people is part of it. However at the core rests issues of multiculturalism, democracy and human rights and civil liberties too. Despite the intellectual legacy to the interwar thinkers, the new far right is no longer local but global, and, thus no longer a matter of individual nation states – but cultures. Traditionalism does however also transcend cultures, and its major opponent is liberalism (or Atlantism) which they argue have contaminated the western world.

Tanja Ellingsen is associate professor of political science at Nord University.

Eve Gianoncelli

On the Culture Battlefield: Sexual Conservatism and

Metapolitics

This paper seeks to investigate the notion of metapolitics as it pertains to reactionary ideologies. Metapolitics is commonly understood as the struggle for cultural hegemony necessary for political conquest. While the concept is familiar in the literature on radical right-wing ideologies, there remains a lack of comprehensive theoretical analysis of its forms, its meanings, and its implications. To fill this gap, I first propose a genealogy of metapolitics, tracing its roots from the 1970s when it was formulated by the far-right theoretician Alain de Benoist, himself strongly influenced by both far right and left-wing intellectuals of the interwar period, to its evolution into a counterculture which has been formally reshaped and disseminated on the internet. I examine metapolitics as a concept, a mode of conceptualisation and a practice. I scrutinise how, from a rhetorical point of view, a tension between culture and politics, politicisation and depoliticisation is displayed and what it may mean. Second, I focus more specifically on the battlefield on which metapolitics is led. I highlight the ways in which gender and sexuality have been connected to race, culture, religion, and nation. I aim to illustrate the various ways in which sex, encompassing gender and sexuality, has evolved into a rhetorical and conceptual tool for legitimisation. This transformation is evident through seemingly modernising the discourse on sex and/or dissimulating racism, both of which share the common purpose of reconfiguring hierarchical and anti-equalitarian perspectives. By doing so, I propose elements to conceptualise sexual conservatism. It seems to me that such a concept can help us better understand key aspects of reactionary ideologies more broadly, in a context where they seem to be more and more numerous and difficult to clearly identify and where the “historical ideologies” – conservatism and fascism – are characterised by increasing porosity, with the various trends of conservatism converging towards radicalism.

Eve Gianoncelli is an intellectual historian. She is a postdoctoral scholar at Nord University, associated also with Maison française d’Oxford.

Valentin Behr (CNRS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & EHESS)

Eve Gianoncelli (Nord University & Maison française d’Oxford)

Variations of Metapolitics: France, Italy, and Poland in perspective

The paper explores the mainstreaming of far-right ideas in contemporary politics, focusing on intellectual and ideological shifts rather than party politics, i.e, what has been called “metapolitics”. We examine the practical implementations of metapolitics in France, Italy, and Poland, where political entrepreneurs like Marion Maréchal Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski have been influenced by a network of intellectuals and pundits. Metapolitics, broadly defined as political strategy outside/beyond traditional politics, involves intellectuals shaping civil society rather than direct engagement in activism or elections. The paper argues that metapolitics has become a common strategy among «New Right» intellectuals in the three countries, but also emphasises its variations and partial translation into a common ideology. The differences in national cases are attributed to variations in conservative intellectuals, spaces of ideological production, and core ideas. First, we propose to examine the pioneering French «Nouvelle Droite,» who formulated this strategy, and its long-lasting influence on conservative intellectual entrepreneurs, particularly active nowadays. Then we focus on Italy, where a national New Right also emerged but where a tradition of islamophobia, gender and antifeminism has successfully been defined since the 2000s and engendered a strong conservative revival. Thirdly, we explore the case of Poland and the ways in which conservative intellectuals have moved from anti-communist stances to illiberal or even anti-liberal ones, following the post-communist transformations after 1989. Last, the paper offers a theoretical argument, linking metapolitical initiatives with mass media, political parties, and social movements. Our hypothesis is that transformations in ideology production spaces and the political field, including disintermediation and media concentration, have facilitated the mainstreaming of conservative ideas. By highlighting the significance of metapolitics in the far-right’s mainstreaming, we finally propose an analytical framework for studying similar ideas in other contexts, including historical contexts such as the interwar period.

Valentin Behr is a political scientist CNRS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & EHESS. His work focuses on the production and circulation of conservative (especially illiberal) ideas, in Europe and between Europe and the United States.

Iryna Shuvalova

Poetry at War. Resilience and Resistance in Ukrainian Writing

Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has provoked a strong response from the Ukrainian creative community from its very onset in 2014 and, with renewed strength, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022. In this context, the Ukrainian literary scene has produced a rich and substantial corpus of texts reflecting both the devastating consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war and the resilience of Ukrainian people in the face of this devastation.

Poets, in particular, have become Ukraine’s global cultural ambassadors, with many of them travelling incessantly to spread awareness about the conflict and promote knowledge about Ukraine beyond the Russian-produced propaganda narratives that often continue to dominate the cultural space in many parts of the world. At the same time, for a significant number of Ukrainian poets, their understanding of civic duty in the context of this war extended beyond their writing. From taking up arms to fundraising, volunteering, and investigating war crimes, poets have worked to safeguard, support, and sustain their community in the face of Russian aggression.

This high level of civic engagement, however, has been characteristic for Ukrainian poets for far longer than just the past decade and the war that has defined it. The sense of political awareness has been a prominent, perhaps even essential feature of Ukrainian writing from early on. The oppression that the people of Ukraine faced first within the Russian Empire and then in the neo-imperial Soviet Union has imbued Ukrainian poetry with a distinct sense of civic duty inherent in working with the language and culture that become singled out as targets of colonial violence.

My paper will provide an overview of the contemporary poetry scene in Ukraine in the context of the ongoing Russia’s war of aggression and against the backdrop of this longstanding tradition of anticolonial resistance.

Iryna Shuvalova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Oslo. She is particularly interested in how political imaginaries are constructed through culture in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Website   LinkedIn  Academia  GoodReads

Book: Pray to the Empty Wells (Lost Horse Press, 2019)

[‘a heart-stirring, gallant and prescient collection’ – The Observer]
Poetry: on LitHub, The White Review, and Words Without Borders
Essay: ‘The mova I live in’ (The Los Angeles Review of Books, 2021)

Research on Russia’s war in Ukraine:
– on subversive femininities in Ukrainian popular culture (2023)
– on representations of the enemy in Ukrainian songs (2022)
– on construction of the ‘Donbas Insurgent’ identity (2021)
– on multilingualism in the context of the war (2020)

Narve Fulsås. The economics and culture of Kjerringøy trading post

Trading with the north of Norway had for centuries been a privilege of Bergen and other southern cities. By the late eighteenth century this changed when towns and trading posts were established along the Northern coast. Kjerringøy grew to become one of the wealthiest of them and stood at his height under E.B.K. Zahl, who ran the place from 1859 till 1900. The new local merchant class became middlemen between the peasant-fishermen households and the export towns, taking over the transport and part of the manufacture of cod products, while also entering almost every other available branch of regional business. Zahl lended money on a large scale, and in 1879 the twenty-year-old Knut Hamsun became one of his clients. Around that time the downward trend for Kjerringøy was about to set in. Due to subsequent owners, it was well preserved and Kjerringøy has survived as the most intact remnant from the glory days of the trading posts. From the 1960s Hamsun was appropriated for northern regionalism and alongside Hamsun’s childhood homeplace Hamarøy, Kjerringøy came to play a prominent part in the historization and visualization of Hamsun’s fictional universe.

Narve Fulsås is professor emeritus in history at the Arctic University in Tromsø (UiT).

Rachel Potter

‘a sort of little United Nations’: International P.E.N

When the United Nations formed in 1945 it sought the help of existing international organisations to further its policy objectives. One of the organisations approached by the UN was International P.E.N. (P.E.N. stands for Poets, Playwrights, Essayists and Novelists). By 1945, P.E.N. had already been operating for twenty-four years. It was for this reason that New York P.E.N. member Manuel Komroff was able to boast that ‘long before the United Nations organized, the writers of the P.E.N. served their people as a sort of little United Nations’.

In this paper I will explore the presuppositions and implications of Komroff’s statement. The UN approached P.E.N. in 1945 because it was viewed as a specialist agency with significant existing literary knowledge and global cultural networks. P.E.N. was asked to advise on free speech questions connected to human rights. It was viewed as representative of the literature that might disseminate the moral substance of human rights. It was seen as a global cultural network well situated to disseminate both the human rights agenda in the 1945 UN Charter and, a few years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was tasked with aiding international understanding through the translation of literary works. And it was identified as a global cultural organisation that could both represent the interests of minority literatures, and inculcate the values of a new post-war internationalism.

In this paper I explore Komroff’s claim that P.E.N. had been acting as  a ‘sort of little United Nations’ avant la lettre. How did P.E.N.’s global literary networks, understanding of rights, and attention to the representation of minority literatures help shape the post-war culture internationalism at the UN and UNESCO? And, what, further, does the close collaboration of literary and political organisations reveal about the relationship between literature and rights?  

Professor Rachel Potter Is professor of Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia, UK:  

Gisèle Sapiro & Peter McDonald – Conversation: A Discourse on Method:

Innovative words, Internationalism, Violence, and Peace, 1921-1946. 

Using The Sociology of Literature (2023) and Artefacts of Writing (2017) as points of departure, Gisèle Sapiro and Peter McDonald discuss the relationship between the sociology of literature (and of intellectuals) and creative criticism and the bearing they have on the challenges of understanding the complex dynamics of culture and politics, war and peace in the early 20^th-century. What do the two forms of enquiry bring to each other? What can they achieve together? Can we account for the roles and behaviours of agents and institutions and for the creativity of writing and reading at the same time and non-violently? And how does the period from the 1920s to the 1940s, which saw the emergence of new internationalist institutions dedicated to peace, including the League of Nations and UNESCO, alongside a burst of antisemitic and xenophobic discourses and of the rise of fascism, speak to our own moment of fraught international relations?

Gisèle Sapiro is professor of sociology at the CNRS and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Peter D McDonald is professor of literature at St Hugh’s college, Oxford, England.  

Andreas Hedberg and Michelle Kelly:

The Shifting Valence of Swedish Neutrality and the Autonomous Literary Sphere in PEN International and Swedish PEN

While attempting to prove itself “a literary international sphere or republic of letters” (Potter 2020), the decision of writers’ organisation PEN International to host the first post-war international congress in Stockholm assumed a significance in 1946 that it did not have when the congress was first scheduled in 1939. In the minutes of the congress we see visiting PEN members commenting on the unique position of Sweden as a country that had remained neutral in the preceding years, largely avoiding the damaging occupations and violent upheavals experienced by fellow national centres, and the consequent effects on writers and the public sphere. By 1946, Sweden – neutral in global politics and semi-peripheral in world literature (Edfeldt et al 2022) – seemed to offer a space from which to shape the post-war literary sphere.

This was not the first – nor would it be the last – time that political neutrality was identified with the values of the literary world in the Swedish context. In her discussion of the Nobel Prize, Pascale Casanova notes that the “first definition of legitimate literary art” adopted by the Swedish Academy immediately before the first world war, “identified it with political neutrality” (2004) – evidence, she argues, of their relative lack of autonomy in the early years of the prize. Later, the increasing activism of Swedish PEN from the late 1960s on coincided with the policy of “active neutrality” pursued by the Swedish state during the Cold War. Our paper will consider the valence of neutrality in the context of the autonomous international literary space that PEN sought to revive in the immediate post-war years. With a focus on Swedish PEN, in particular, we explore the relationship between these shifting versions of political neutrality and the kind of autonomous literary space pursued by PEN.

Andreas Hedberg

Andreas Hedberg is associate professor of literature at Uppsala University and senior lecturer at Mälardalen University, Sweden. Among his research interests are publishing studies, processes of literary canonization and the critique of modernity in 19th and 20th century literature. In his most recent projects, he has focused on world literature, especially cultural transfer and the sociology of translation. Hedberg’s latest publications include the monographs Northern Crossings: Translation, Circulation and the Literary Semi-periphery (co-authored, Bloomsbury, 2022) and Ord från norr. Svensk skönlitteratur på den franska bokmarknaden efter 1945 (Stockholm University Press, 2022).

Michelle Kelly

Michelle Kelly’s research interests are in the field of world literature, South African literature, prison writing, literary internationalism, and literature and other art forms and media. She has published several articles on the work of J. M. Coetzee and is currently completing a monograph titled The Confessing Animal: Coetzee’s Confessional Aesthetics. Her other current focus is on the significance of the imprisoned writer within the writers’ organisation PEN International. She is the co-editor, with Claire Westall, of the volume Prison Writing and the Literary World, to which she contributed an essay on ‘PEN and the Writer as Prisoner’. She is a Research Associate at King’s College London on the UKRI-funded LITAID project: Decolonization, Appropriation and the Materials of Literature in Africa and its Diaspora.

Tore Rem

Knut Hamsun from Kjerringøy to the Ossietzky debate

Who was Knut Hamsun when the debate about Carl von Ossietzky and his Nobel Peace Prize candidature started in 1935? To what extent had the Norwegian author already positioned himself as a right-wing intellectual, and with what authority?

I will begin by briefly tracing Hamsun’s intellectual trajectory up until the beginning of the crucial debate about Ossietzky and the new Germany. After establishing Hamsun’s authorial role, as well as documenting his private attitudes and public interventions, I will contextualize the debate and discuss its consequences. I would like to understand the polarization of the Norwegian literary field, and the positions taken up by other writers in relation to Hamsun, as well as give the Norwegian debate a larger context, namely that of the struggle fought on Ossietzky’s behalf by German émigré writers and intellectuals. For them, too, Hamsun came to play a vital role, but perhaps not in the way he had intended.

Tore Rem is professor Literature at the University of Oslo. He is the director of UiO Democracy.

Erik Vassenden

«Chapter the Last” (1923/ Engl. 1929) – Knut Hamsun’s final solution and its critical reception

In 1923, Hamsun published the by all accounts darkest of his criticisms of contemporary society in the form of the novel Chapter the Last. In a manner resembling Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), Hamsun populates a sanatorium in the Norwegian high mountains with representatives of all kinds of civilatory illnesses and problems. But contrary to Mann, Hamsun does not stage a larger discussion of philosophical questions or ideas at the center of the novel. Rather, he uses it as a vessel for satire over human folly and the deplorable state of the modern civilization that according to the critical reception is considered an “entertaining” and “humoristic”. However, as he eventually proceeds to burn down the sanatorium with all its inhabitants (except the two who embody a sufficient will and ability to live), it reads as the unlikely combination of a satirical novel and a Holocaust fantasy. The presentation will examine the novel and its critical reception with particular attention to how readers historically have responded to Hamsun’s combination of seemingly lighthearted satire and harsh criticism of civilization.

Erik Vassenden is professor of Nordic literature at the University of Bergen.

Johs Hjellbrekke

Literary Space and Subspaces. Political Position Takings During WW2 in Literary Subspaces.

Previous analyses have revealed that the Norwegian space of literary practices was structured along three main dimensions: fiction vs. non-fiction, modern literature vs traditional literature, and popular literature/children’s books vs. other forms of literature (Hjellbrekke & al. 2024, under review). Fiction vs. non-fiction was strongly linked to the agents’ volumes of educational capital, and the modern vs. traditional opposition was structured according to class origins and class divisions. The relations between the space of literary practices and the space of position takings during WW II were also strong. Whereas resistance writers would more often be found in the modern, upper class and youngest sectors of the space, overt NS supporters and collaborators were more often located in the traditional, older and lower class/farmer origin sectors of the same space. But the literary subspace constituted by the NS supporters and collaborators, did not mirror those found in the global space. The internal cleavages were also stronger, indicating that distinct oppositions and hierarchies were at work.

Less is known about the oppositions in other relevant, literary subspaces, e.g. “Nynorsk” vs “Bokmål” writers, urban vs. rural writers, male vs. female writers etc. Based on prosopographical data on 308 authors active in Norway during the 1930s and 40s, by way of MCA and CSA (Hjellbrekke 2018) and inspired by Bourdieu’s field theory (Bourdieu 2021) and by Sapiro’s work on France (Sapiro 1996, 1999, 2006), this presentation will do a systematic investigation of the relations between the global space of literary practices and the various subspaces, and how political position taking varied within and between these subspaces.   

Keywords:  Literary field, Subspaces World War II, Class Specific MCA, Cluster Analysis, Relational analysis. 

Johs Hjellbrekke is professor of sociology at the University of Bergen. 

Parallel sections:

Jennifer Harvey

The Modernism/Fascism Nexus: Nation, History, and Form in the Modernist War Poem 

Modernism and fascism may seem opposed, but recent scholarship has laid bare their profound interrelation, rendering an examination of their relation, which Barbara Will terms the “modernism/fascism nexus,” a sine qua non of any assessment of modernist poetry. This paper therefor seeks to assess modernist poetry through a conceptualisation of this nexus, questioning the extent to which poetic formalisation is linked to the nationalisation and historicisation inherent within fascist ideologies of palingenesis.

Drawing on the wartime writings of Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, and Gertrude Stein, modernist poets who grappled with the question of foundation, or the historical “ground zero” suddenly imposed by the interwar and postwar periods, this paper examines the problematic and misunderstood relationships between poetic form, the nation form, and history as a narrative form, complicating the possible vectors along which they have been and can be broken apart. While Pound’s sympathy for Mussolini is both historically well-documented and explored in The Cantos (1962), Gertrude Stein’s relationship to fascism remains more tenuous, having been chronicled through her support of Franco during the Spanish Civil War, comments about Hitler getting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938, and hinted at by her conservatism in Wars I Have Seen (1945). Auden, unequivocally anti-fascist, grappled with questions of history and historicisation early on, like Pound, turning away from them eventually to posit a divorce between poetry and history, like Stein.

Privileging these concerns rather than poetries of nationalism or national identity, this comparative study raises critical questions about quietism and the aestheticisation of politics, the mythological role of the poet as founder, and the self-production of literary history within the remit of a global horizon.

Jennifer Harvey is a PhD student in anglophone literature at the Université de Lille.

Erin Small Capistrano:

The intersection of journalism, performance and censorship in the play Ethiopia (1936), a “Living Newspaper” created in the wake of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

This paper explores the intersection of journalism, performance and censorship in the play Ethiopia (1936), a “Living Newspaper” created in the wake of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. It was the first Living Newspaper developed by the US government-funded Federal Theatre Project (FTP), as well as the project’s first major confrontation with the government over censorship. I argue that Ethiopia and the other Living Newspapers were shaped by a complex interaction of leftist artistic and political influences, government support and censorship, and reactionary elements within both the government and society at large. Initially, this paper examines how the Living Newspapers fused experimental Soviet and European agitprop techniques with popular American performance forms and news media. It then argues that this fusion enabled Ethiopia to analyze and critique political rhetoric and dramatize tensions between collective and individual power. Finally, the paper illustrates that while Ethiopia examined the effects of political ideologies abroad, the play was itself shaped by ideological and political pressures at home. Wary of being seen to condone (and indeed fund) criticism of Mussolini, the US government banned the depiction of foreign heads of state onstage in FTP productions, effectively censoring Ethiopia. The project went on to create other, extremely popular, Living Newspapers, but was accused of spreading anti-American communist propaganda by both the conservative press and influential politicians. While the form of the Living Newspapers created subversive possibilities for political critique, it was also marked by compromise and conflicting understandings of the American public’s capacity for political action.

Bio

Erin Small Capistrano is a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo, working on a project entitled “Theatre of Citation: Documentary Theatre & the Political Spectator” as part of the Forms of Resistance research group. Originally from the US, she worked as a dramaturg, performer and educator in NYC before moving to Norway. She has a BA from Yale University and an MA from King’s College, London. Her work focuses on the relationship between theatre and politics, and the ways in which aesthetic forms are shaped by, and occasionally intervene in, their sociopolitical contexts.

Alvhild Dvergsdal.

Nazi rhetoric in Knut Hamsun’s political prose in the 1930s?

In 1933, after finishing the August trilogy, Hamsun put aside novel writing and concentrated on political writings. We don’t know if he ever read Hitler’s Mein Kampf and he didn’t read or understand German. But he read newspapers and books and was highly interested in national, European and world politics in general, Hitler’s and Quisling’s projects in particular. I will present a small study in Hamsun’s rhetoric 1933 – 1940, concentrating on some key expressions recognizable from Nazi propaganda. Main literature will be Klemperer 1947, Süskind 1968, Schmitz-Berning 2000.

Alvhild Dvergsdal is director of research at the Hamsun center at Hamarøy.

Diana Gor.

The Contraband Ukrainian Translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm

George Orwell’s Animal Farm faced many obstacles in its publication. While Western leftists believed in Stalin’s USSR, Orwell rejected this naïvete, resulting in one of the most revelatory allegories for Stalinism being written. However, as the West supported the Soviet Union following the defeat of Hitler, Orwell’s acclaimed novel was rejected by both conservative and liberal publishers alike for its audacious criticism of England’s ally before its 1945 publication. Simultaneously, Ukrainian refugees in German Displaced Persons camps bordered between two systems: the West– which would forcefully repatriate them to the USSR– and the Soviet Union– which would imprison them for fleeing. By 1946, Animal Farm reached Polish-born Ihor Ševčenko, a Ukrainian seeking to help his countrymen, and received permission from Orwell to translate the book into Ukrainian in 1947, resulting in Kolhosp tvaryn [Collective Farm of the Animals]. A reference to Collectivization, Kolhosp tvaryn provided hope to Ukrainian DPs as it acknowledged the truth of Stalinism, and consequently became contraband as 1500-3000 copies were destroyed by occupying forces. Through archival material and correspondence, this presentation will consider: why was nearly half of the Ukrainian translation’s print run destroyed while Animal Farm translations later became a weapon of the Cold War? Why do both Ševčenko’s translation and Orwell’s fairytale continue to return to readers as censorship evolves and regresses? It will also trace the long-standing history and circulation of Kolhosp tvaryn and Animal Farm to reflect on the impact of censorship in the context of resurfacing political extremism across the globe.

Diana Gor is an incoming graduate student at Stanford University

Oleksandr Avramchuk.

The Exiled Mind. Anti-Soviet Defectors, Munich Institute, and the Cold War Politics of Knowledge

Amidst the Cold War’s ideological battle, a unique confluence of Eastern European exiles and American anti-communism emerged, centered around the Munich Institute for the Study of the USSR. This paper uncovers the story of non-Russian, mostly Ukrainian, exile intellectuals, who served not just as anti-Soviet defectors but as crucial allies in the West’s ideological struggle against Soviet power. With its roots deeply embedded in the fertile soil of political exile, the Institute’s mission spanned over two decades (1950-1971), reflecting the evolving American stance on the Soviet future. Backed by the CIA, it became a hub of intellectual and cultural resistance, leveraging the diverse backgrounds and insights of Soviet defectors to inform Western intelligence and shape the U.S. machine of political warfare.

The Institute made multiple contributions, enhancing the West’s understanding of Soviet matters on issues ranging from history and sociology to literary politics and science, as well as supporting the efforts of clandestine broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain. This intersection of exile efforts and American initiatives unveils a rich mosaic of ideological, political, and cultural conflicts, providing a novel viewpoint on the Cold War dynamics and the role of intellectuals in tumultuous times. It serves as a litmus test of the fragility of liberal democracy in the face of totalitarian dictatorships, the conditionality of freedom of speech and the widespread censorship across the Iron Curtain. The rise and fall of the Institute underscore the complex and shifting perceptions of foes and allies by the U.S., reflecting the ambiguous and fluctuating politics of knowledge during the Cold War.

Oleksandr Avramchuk

John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

avramchukop@gmail.com

Kamilla Aslaksen:

On women’s freedom of speech

Women in the Global North experience a high degree of equality and absence of discrimination compared to women in other parts of the world. This is also true for their ability to express themselves freely.

However, in May 2023,the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, expressed concern about the decrease in women’s freedom of assembly and freedom of speech without intimidation or coercion in several countries in the Global North. According to Ansalem, the tactics to silence women range from public shaming such as online smear campaigns, to institutional reprisals through provisions that criminalize hate speech. Freedom of speech for women in academia is a particular concern:

Measures that I find particularly concerning include reprisals [against researchers and academics] such as censorship, legal harassment, loss of jobs, loss of income, removal from social media platforms, speaking engagements and the refusal to publish research conclusions and articles. (Ansalem, 2023)

In this paper, I will present and discuss Ansalem’s statement, where I also investigate the background for her concerns. What are the impulses and motifs behind the silencing of women in the Global North today? Is this development associated to greater ideological shifts? Is there a connection between the silencing of women and new media technology?

This paper is part of a work in progress where I investigate women’s freedom of speech in a historical perspective. The claim is that, although the methods vary, we see perpetual silencing of women through shifting times. 

Anslalem, R. (2023) “Allow women and girls to speak on sex, gender and gender identity without intimidation or fear.” Statement by Ms. Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/05/allow-women-and-girls-speak-sex-gender-and-gender-identity-without

Biography:

The presenter is Associate Professor in Nordic literature with PhD in Library and Information Studies and MA in Scandinavian studies. She has published numerous articles on book history, “The Modern Breakthrough” in Scandinavian literature and gender in literature. In 2020-2022 se made the bibliography of Hamsun’s book collection at Nørholm.

Key words
Freedom of speech, democracy, women’s rights, silencing,  cancel culture

Ronny Spaans

New Norwegian Poets of the interwar years and the political impulses from the Folk high school 

‘All England is a fairy tale to me. And the evil they have done, others would have done to a greater degree’. The poet Olav Nygard writes this in a letter to Hulda Garborg. On the other hand, the fellow poet Tore Ørjasæter, Germany was a literary and ideological ideal. In this article, I examine what ideological and political concepts young New Norwegian poets, with a background in rural Norway, adopted during their years of study in the Folk high schools in the beginning of the last century. I will show that the various impulses these poets received from the Folk high schools had a lot to say for their political and literary development. In Olav Nygard’s case, the English teacher at Ørsta Folk high school, Olav Åsmundstad, was an important inspiration for his love of British culture. When Tore Ørjasæter met the German Minister of Science, Education and National Culture, Bernhard Rust, in 1936, he referred to Rust’s interest in soil and heritage as coinciding with ‘our folk high school vision’. Besides Olav Nygard and Tore Ørjasæter, I discuss poets such as Olav Aukrust, Henrik Rytter and Peter Munheim.

Ronny Spaans is Professor in Nordic Literature at the University of Oslo. In 2015 he earned his PhD at the same university with a thesis on the poetry of the Dutch writer Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620–1695). The thesis appeared in 2020 as a monograph at Amsterdam University Press with the title: Dangerous Drugs. The Self-Presentation of the Merchant-Poet Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620–1695). He is currently working on a project on the early modern Norwegian writer Petter Dass. Dr. Spaans has also done research on New-Norwegian literature in the interwar period, as the Shakespeare-translations of Henrik Rytter.

Leiv Sem

Brothers in arms? The Christian Fascism, Psalms and Religious Poetry of Dagfinn and Ludvig Daae Zwilgmeyer.

The brothers Dagfinn and Ludvig Daae Zwilgmeyer were both priests and members of a family of clerics, writers and politicians. Both sided with the Nazi Government during the occupation, and became central in the New Order church, Ludvig as an ardent NS bishop, Dagfinn as bishop and editor of a new psalm book commissioned by the NS. The brothers developed and represented a Norwegian form of Christian Fascism, based on ideas of Norse tradition and the Nordic cultural landscape, of authority and the need for spiritual rejuvenation. They promoted these ideas as priests, as politicians — and also as poets: Both also wrote hymns, Dagfinn also published a treaty on The Norwegian Psalm in 1942. 

In this paper I will discuss their ideas and works with focus on their literary production and its reception.  

Leiv Sem is professor of Cultural History at Nord University

Carlo de Nuzzo.

Ideology and right-wing intellectuals’ European nationalism neofascism

It is wrong to think that the European far right has remained aloof from the cultural debate on Europe. On the contrary, in extreme right-wing circles there has always been a intense debate on the nature and shape of Europe, where a specific mythical and cultural construction of a neo-fascist Europe has developed.

The theme of European integration was used by Italian fascism and the Third Reich, exploiting and manipulating a number of historical and cultural references, such as Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Europe and historical and intellectual figures like Charlemagne, Napoleon, Nietzsche, etc.

Political thought, in its various shades and tendencies of European nationalism, had already mapped out the path towards the revolutionary political unification of the continent, at least from Schmitt and Haushofer to Jünger and Thiriart, via Drieu La Rochelle, Bardèche and Brasillach.

But after the ideological and military defeat of fascism and Nazism in the Second World War there is a clear necessity, on the part of neo-fascist intellectuals, for the elaboration of a new idea of the European nation.

European neo-fascist nationalism, which conceives of Europe as a myth takes up on the one hand the fascist tradition, the rexist tradition of Léon Degrelle, and above all the Nazi tradition of the Neuordnung; and on the other hand the new theoretical-ideological reworkings of the post-war period in opposition to the Yalta partition, for a united Europe not subordinated to American and Soviet politico-military influence.

My contribution aims to give an overview of the construction of the ideology of European nationalism by neo-fascist intellectuals.

Bio

I hold a Master’s degree in History from the Università degli Studi di Milano and I recently obtained my PhD in political science from Sciences Po (2023) on the comparative history of citizenship in France and Italy. My research interests also encompass national identity, fascism and neo-fascism in Europe. I currently work as a teaching assistant at Sciences Po Paris, and prior to this position as a research and teaching assistant at the University of Lille. My research interests are: History of citizenship, fascism, neo-fascism, far and radical right in Europe.

Sofie Arneberg and Lars Johnsen

On big data, digital readings and ideas for the WV project. 

How can we use text mining to identify traits or describe the literature of Norwegian writers before and during World War II? How can a statistical analysis of the writers’ political and aesthetical position taking in the 1930s and 40s be used as a steppingstone for new studies into a literary epoch?

We will combine the variables from the Words and Violence project’s newly constructed detailed data base, with features from a textual analysis of the writers’ literary production of the period.  The project data base consists of information on 308 writers active in Norway during the 1930s and 40s. The textual data is provided by DH-lab of the National Library of Norway:  Based on new bibliographies, a corpus consisting of the literary works of the 308 writers, approximately 3000 books, was built and studied using the tools available at DH-lab.

The combination of statistical investigation methods on one front and literary text mining on the other has the potential to yield valuable insights. This convergence allows for the testing of specific assumptions while simultaneously giving rise to new questions about the material.

Sofie Arneberg and Lars Johnson are researchers in digital humanities at the National Library of Norway, in Oslo.

By order of appearance:

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen

Words and Violence. Literary Intellectuals Between Democracy and Dictatorship 1933-1952. Overview and preliminary results.

“Words and Violence” is a large-scale research project analysing the democratic resilience and vulnerability of cultural life in the 1930s and ’40s, using both statistical and qualitative approaches. In this lecture, Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen will present the key theoretical presuppositions, research design and preliminary results from the project.  

The Words and Violence-group examines the history of the Norwegian literary field, spanning from the so called “culture wars” of the 1930s concerning immigration, race, and gender, to the Nazification and resistance during the occupation years, and the subsequent purges and legal reckoning connected with the reestablishment of democracy. The Norwegian experience is compared with that of other countries under fascist occupation during World War II.

In retrospect, the occupation years from 1940 to 45 represent something of a natural experiment for the sociology of culture. In liberal societies, like interwar Norway, literature and other arts typically enjoy a unique autonomy, which was lost overnight with the German invasion. How did the literary community respond to this upheaval? What motivated writers and intellectuals to make the choices they did when confronted with a fascist regime that enforced censorship and terror, yet also prioritized and allocated resources to the cultural sector?

The aim is to produce solid knowledge about historical issues that are hotly debated and of obvious contemporary relevance, but that are rarely researched in a systematic way.

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen is professor of intellectual history, Nord University, Bodø Norway.  He is a former Henrik Steffens Professor of the department for Northern European Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany.

Anders Engberg-Pedersen

Inventing WWIII. Ideology, Warfare, and the Securitization of the Novel

Since 2015, two influential American authors and military consultants have sought to leverage imaginative literature for the cause of national security. On the basis of concepts such as “useful fiction” and “FICINT,” a shorthand for “fictional intelligence,” they have sought to develop a new genre, which blends non-fictional research and predictive threat scenarios with the creative inventions and emotional appeal of fiction. In this talk, I trace how the national security novel arose through a process of securitization, which has gradually merged the realm of literature with that of policy and military strategy, and I assess the genre’s ideological underpinnings as well as

their current and future impact on national and global security.

Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Director of Nordic Humanities Center – University of Copenhagen and University of Southern Denmark. Professor of Comparative Literature – University of Southern Denmark. Chair of Humanities at the Danish Institute of Advanced Study.

Alan Finlayson

A Hero’s Journey? Ideological Entrepreneurs and Reactionary Digital Politics 

On digital platforms a distinct form of reactionary political ideology has crystallised around hostility to ‘liberal’ egalitarianism, denunciations of contemporary culture and calls for a return to ‘natural’ hierarchies. It draws on long-standing themes in reactionary, conservative and far-right politics but reshapes and reorganises them in particular ways, inviting followers to experience themselves as a particular kind of heroic political saviour.

In the first part of this presentation, I explain what ‘reactionary digital politics’ is, outlining the key claims and arguments around which it is built: that a natural socio-economic hierarchy (of sex, race and individual talent) is being undermined by ‘liberal’ politics; that this necessarily leads to a concentration of state power; that traditional religious, political and cultural groups are being aggressively victimised.

In the second part of the talk, I explain that key avatars of this politics are online ‘ideological entrepreneurs’. These are individuals who, untethered from modern political and journalistic institutions, are able to make a living from the business of manufacturing partisan political analysis and critique. Their political rhetoric is adapted to – and shaped by – the political economy and the affordances of digital media. Ideological entrepreneurs excel at decontextualising and recontextualising political and media events, so as to ‘explain’ them. Their rhetoric is thus centred on the revelation of ‘secrets’ and exposure of ‘the truth’ of ‘what’s really going on’, representing specific events as examples of a wider and deeper political strategy to undermine natural and traditional orders, and to intensify means of dominating individuals’ bodies and minds. Through this discourse reactionary ideological entrepreneurs cultivate a form of charismatic authority; followers are promised liberation, empowerment and even salvation if they accept the truth and take part in resistance, becoming heroes and saviours of the counter-revolution.

In the third part of the talk, I show how one element of this reactionary digital politics is a critique of media culture for failing to abide by the rules of the “hero’s journey” – as outlined by Joseph Campbell – and for refusing to tell stories which communicate what are imagined to be deeper moral and spiritual truths. Followers are urged not only to protest about this, however, but to make the hero’s journey a reality in their own life. They are thus oriented to politics in a very particular way: as (male) heroes who must identify and point out the enemies around them, cultivate the capacity to endure the trials imposed on them and so emerge as transformed individuals, connected to transcendent truths. The Manichean, sectarian and violent politics to which this gives rise is all too apparent.

Alan Finlayson is professor of Political & Social Theory, School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies. University of East Anglia.

Tanja Ellingsen.

From Fascism to Traditionalism: The Legacy of Interwar Intellectuals and the New Far Right

Far right groups and parties has become increasingly visible in both Europe and the United States the last decade. The web of ties between these groups and Russia has also come more to the surface as a result of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The year 2024 and the number of upcoming elections, is by many seen as a possible turning-point within history. Similarities and parallels to the interwar period and the growth of fascism (and Nazism) are frequently commented upon both in popular media and within academic circles. This paper argues that the current wave of far right extremists is anchored in many of the same intellectuals as the fascists and national socialists in the 1920-30s. However while Fascism and Nazism adapted their intellectuals to a more biological racist and nation-state framework,  the New Far Right return to what they describe as “traditional values”. Interwar intellectuals such as the Italian philosopher Julius Evola is oftentimes referred to as a fascist thinker. However both Evola and the French philosopher René Guénon (who converted to Islam) were actually the founders of Traditionalism which both Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin have officially stated their admiration of and where Russia is seen as a bastion of traditionalism. Culture wars, focusing on issues such as feminism, homosexuality or transgender people is part of it. However at the core rests issues of multiculturalism, democracy and human rights and civil liberties too. Despite the intellectual legacy to the interwar thinkers, the new far right is no longer local but global, and, thus no longer a matter of individual nation states – but cultures. Traditionalism does however also transcend cultures, and its major opponent is liberalism (or Atlantism) which they argue have contaminated the western world.

Tanja Ellingsen is associate professor of political science at Nord University.

Eve Gianoncelli

On the Culture Battlefield: Sexual Conservatism and

Metapolitics

This paper seeks to investigate the notion of metapolitics as it pertains to reactionary ideologies. Metapolitics is commonly understood as the struggle for cultural hegemony necessary for political conquest. While the concept is familiar in the literature on radical right-wing ideologies, there remains a lack of comprehensive theoretical analysis of its forms, its meanings, and its implications. To fill this gap, I first propose a genealogy of metapolitics, tracing its roots from the 1970s when it was formulated by the far-right theoretician Alain de Benoist, himself strongly influenced by both far right and left-wing intellectuals of the interwar period, to its evolution into a counterculture which has been formally reshaped and disseminated on the internet. I examine metapolitics as a concept, a mode of conceptualisation and a practice. I scrutinise how, from a rhetorical point of view, a tension between culture and politics, politicisation and depoliticisation is displayed and what it may mean. Second, I focus more specifically on the battlefield on which metapolitics is led. I highlight the ways in which gender and sexuality have been connected to race, culture, religion, and nation. I aim to illustrate the various ways in which sex, encompassing gender and sexuality, has evolved into a rhetorical and conceptual tool for legitimisation. This transformation is evident through seemingly modernising the discourse on sex and/or dissimulating racism, both of which share the common purpose of reconfiguring hierarchical and anti-equalitarian perspectives. By doing so, I propose elements to conceptualise sexual conservatism. It seems to me that such a concept can help us better understand key aspects of reactionary ideologies more broadly, in a context where they seem to be more and more numerous and difficult to clearly identify and where the “historical ideologies” – conservatism and fascism – are characterised by increasing porosity, with the various trends of conservatism converging towards radicalism.

Eve Gianoncelli is an intellectual historian. She is a postdoctoral scholar at Nord University, associated also with Maison française d’Oxford.

Valentin Behr (CNRS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & EHESS)

Eve Gianoncelli (Nord University & Maison française d’Oxford)

Variations of Metapolitics: France, Italy, and Poland in perspective

The paper explores the mainstreaming of far-right ideas in contemporary politics, focusing on intellectual and ideological shifts rather than party politics, i.e, what has been called “metapolitics”. We examine the practical implementations of metapolitics in France, Italy, and Poland, where political entrepreneurs like Marion Maréchal Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski have been influenced by a network of intellectuals and pundits. Metapolitics, broadly defined as political strategy outside/beyond traditional politics, involves intellectuals shaping civil society rather than direct engagement in activism or elections. The paper argues that metapolitics has become a common strategy among «New Right» intellectuals in the three countries, but also emphasises its variations and partial translation into a common ideology. The differences in national cases are attributed to variations in conservative intellectuals, spaces of ideological production, and core ideas. First, we propose to examine the pioneering French «Nouvelle Droite,» who formulated this strategy, and its long-lasting influence on conservative intellectual entrepreneurs, particularly active nowadays. Then we focus on Italy, where a national New Right also emerged but where a tradition of islamophobia, gender and antifeminism has successfully been defined since the 2000s and engendered a strong conservative revival. Thirdly, we explore the case of Poland and the ways in which conservative intellectuals have moved from anti-communist stances to illiberal or even anti-liberal ones, following the post-communist transformations after 1989. Last, the paper offers a theoretical argument, linking metapolitical initiatives with mass media, political parties, and social movements. Our hypothesis is that transformations in ideology production spaces and the political field, including disintermediation and media concentration, have facilitated the mainstreaming of conservative ideas. By highlighting the significance of metapolitics in the far-right’s mainstreaming, we finally propose an analytical framework for studying similar ideas in other contexts, including historical contexts such as the interwar period.

Valentin Behr is a political scientist CNRS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & EHESS. His work focuses on the production and circulation of conservative (especially illiberal) ideas, in Europe and between Europe and the United States.

Iryna Shuvalova

Poetry at War. Resilience and Resistance in Ukrainian Writing

Iryna Shuvalova is a prize winning Ukrainian poet.

She is also Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo

Website   LinkedIn  Academia  GoodReads

Book: Pray to the Empty Wells (Lost Horse Press, 2019)

[‘a heart-stirring, gallant and prescient collection’ – The Observer]
Poetry: on LitHub, The White Review, and Words Without Borders
Essay: ‘The mova I live in’ (The Los Angeles Review of Books, 2021)

Research on Russia’s war in Ukraine:
– on subversive femininities in Ukrainian popular culture (2023)
– on representations of the enemy in Ukrainian songs (2022)
– on construction of the ‘Donbas Insurgent’ identity (2021)
– on multilingualism in the context of the war (2020)

Narve Fulsås. The economics and culture of Kjerringøy trading post

Trading with the north of Norway had for centuries been a privilege of Bergen and other southern cities. By the late eighteenth century this changed when towns and trading posts were established along the Northern coast. Kjerringøy grew to become one of the wealthiest of them and stood at his height under E.B.K. Zahl, who ran the place from 1859 till 1900. The new local merchant class became middlemen between the peasant-fishermen households and the export towns, taking over the transport and part of the manufacture of cod products, while also entering almost every other available branch of regional business. Zahl lended money on a large scale, and in 1879 the twenty-year-old Knut Hamsun became one of his clients. Around that time the downward trend for Kjerringøy was about to set in. Due to subsequent owners, it was well preserved and Kjerringøy has survived as the most intact remnant from the glory days of the trading posts. From the 1960s Hamsun was appropriated for northern regionalism and alongside Hamsun’s childhood homeplace Hamarøy, Kjerringøy came to play a prominent part in the historization and visualization of Hamsun’s fictional universe.

Narve Fulsås is professor emeritus in history at the Arctic University in Tromsø (UiT).

Rachel Potter

‘a sort of little United Nations’: International P.E.N

When the United Nations formed in 1945 it sought the help of existing international organisations to further its policy objectives. One of the organisations approached by the UN was International P.E.N. (P.E.N. stands for Poets, Playwrights, Essayists and Novelists). By 1945, P.E.N. had already been operating for twenty-four years. It was for this reason that New York P.E.N. member Manuel Komroff was able to boast that ‘long before the United Nations organized, the writers of the P.E.N. served their people as a sort of little United Nations’.

In this paper I will explore the presuppositions and implications of Komroff’s statement. The UN approached P.E.N. in 1945 because it was viewed as a specialist agency with significant existing literary knowledge and global cultural networks. P.E.N. was asked to advise on free speech questions connected to human rights. It was viewed as representative of the literature that might disseminate the moral substance of human rights. It was seen as a global cultural network well situated to disseminate both the human rights agenda in the 1945 UN Charter and, a few years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was tasked with aiding international understanding through the translation of literary works. And it was identified as a global cultural organisation that could both represent the interests of minority literatures, and inculcate the values of a new post-war internationalism.

In this paper I explore Komroff’s claim that P.E.N. had been acting as  a ‘sort of little United Nations’ avant la lettre. How did P.E.N.’s global literary networks, understanding of rights, and attention to the representation of minority literatures help shape the post-war culture internationalism at the UN and UNESCO? And, what, further, does the close collaboration of literary and political organisations reveal about the relationship between literature and rights?  

Professor Rachel Potter Is professor of Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia, UK:  

Gisèle Sapiro & Peter McDonald – Conversation: A Discourse on Method:

Innovative words, Internationalism, Violence, and Peace, 1921-1946. 

Using The Sociology of Literature (2023) and Artefacts of Writing (2017) as points of departure, Gisèle Sapiro and Peter McDonald discuss the relationship between the sociology of literature (and of intellectuals) and creative criticism and the bearing they have on the challenges of understanding the complex dynamics of culture and politics, war and peace in the early 20^th-century. What do the two forms of enquiry bring to each other? What can they achieve together? Can we account for the roles and behaviours of agents and institutions and for the creativity of writing and reading at the same time and non-violently? And how does the period from the 1920s to the 1940s, which saw the emergence of new internationalist institutions dedicated to peace, including the League of Nations and UNESCO, alongside a burst of antisemitic and xenophobic discourses and of the rise of fascism, speak to our own moment of fraught international relations?

Gisèle Sapiro is professor of sociology at the CNRS and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Peter D McDonald is professor of literature at St Hugh’s college, Oxford, England.  

Andreas Hedberg and Michelle Kelly:

The Shifting Valence of Swedish Neutrality and the Autonomous Literary Sphere in PEN International and Swedish PEN

While attempting to prove itself “a literary international sphere or republic of letters” (Potter 2020), the decision of writers’ organisation PEN International to host the first post-war international congress in Stockholm assumed a significance in 1946 that it did not have when the congress was first scheduled in 1939. In the minutes of the congress we see visiting PEN members commenting on the unique position of Sweden as a country that had remained neutral in the preceding years, largely avoiding the damaging occupations and violent upheavals experienced by fellow national centres, and the consequent effects on writers and the public sphere. By 1946, Sweden – neutral in global politics and semi-peripheral in world literature (Edfeldt et al 2022) – seemed to offer a space from which to shape the post-war literary sphere.

This was not the first – nor would it be the last – time that political neutrality was identified with the values of the literary world in the Swedish context. In her discussion of the Nobel Prize, Pascale Casanova notes that the “first definition of legitimate literary art” adopted by the Swedish Academy immediately before the first world war, “identified it with political neutrality” (2004) – evidence, she argues, of their relative lack of autonomy in the early years of the prize. Later, the increasing activism of Swedish PEN from the late 1960s on coincided with the policy of “active neutrality” pursued by the Swedish state during the Cold War. Our paper will consider the valence of neutrality in the context of the autonomous international literary space that PEN sought to revive in the immediate post-war years. With a focus on Swedish PEN, in particular, we explore the relationship between these shifting versions of political neutrality and the kind of autonomous literary space pursued by PEN.

Andreas Hedberg

Andreas Hedberg is associate professor of literature at Uppsala University and senior lecturer at Mälardalen University, Sweden. Among his research interests are publishing studies, processes of literary canonization and the critique of modernity in 19th and 20th century literature. In his most recent projects, he has focused on world literature, especially cultural transfer and the sociology of translation. Hedberg’s latest publications include the monographs Northern Crossings: Translation, Circulation and the Literary Semi-periphery (co-authored, Bloomsbury, 2022) and Ord från norr. Svensk skönlitteratur på den franska bokmarknaden efter 1945 (Stockholm University Press, 2022).

Michelle Kelly

Michelle Kelly’s research interests are in the field of world literature, South African literature, prison writing, literary internationalism, and literature and other art forms and media. She has published several articles on the work of J. M. Coetzee and is currently completing a monograph titled The Confessing Animal: Coetzee’s Confessional Aesthetics. Her other current focus is on the significance of the imprisoned writer within the writers’ organisation PEN International. She is the co-editor, with Claire Westall, of the volume Prison Writing and the Literary World, to which she contributed an essay on ‘PEN and the Writer as Prisoner’. She is a Research Associate at King’s College London on the UKRI-funded LITAID project: Decolonization, Appropriation and the Materials of Literature in Africa and its Diaspora.

Tore Rem

Knut Hamsun from Kjerringøy to the Ossietzky debate

Who was Knut Hamsun when the debate about Carl von Ossietzky and his Nobel Peace Prize candidature started in 1935? To what extent had the Norwegian author already positioned himself as a right-wing intellectual, and with what authority?

I will begin by briefly tracing Hamsun’s intellectual trajectory up until the beginning of the crucial debate about Ossietzky and the new Germany. After establishing Hamsun’s authorial role, as well as documenting his private attitudes and public interventions, I will contextualize the debate and discuss its consequences. I would like to understand the polarization of the Norwegian literary field, and the positions taken up by other writers in relation to Hamsun, as well as give the Norwegian debate a larger context, namely that of the struggle fought on Ossietzky’s behalf by German émigré writers and intellectuals. For them, too, Hamsun came to play a vital role, but perhaps not in the way he had intended.

Tore Rem is professor Literature at the University of Oslo. He is the director of UiO Democracy.

Erik Vassenden

«Chapter the Last” (1923/ Engl. 1929) – Knut Hamsun’s final solution and its critical reception

In 1923, Hamsun published the by all accounts darkest of his criticisms of contemporary society in the form of the novel Chapter the Last. In a manner resembling Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), Hamsun populates a sanatorium in the Norwegian high mountains with representatives of all kinds of civilatory illnesses and problems. But contrary to Mann, Hamsun does not stage a larger discussion of philosophical questions or ideas at the center of the novel. Rather, he uses it as a vessel for satire over human folly and the deplorable state of the modern civilization that according to the critical reception is considered an “entertaining” and “humoristic”. However, as he eventually proceeds to burn down the sanatorium with all its inhabitants (except the two who embody a sufficient will and ability to live), it reads as the unlikely combination of a satirical novel and a Holocaust fantasy. The presentation will examine the novel and its critical reception with particular attention to how readers historically have responded to Hamsun’s combination of seemingly lighthearted satire and harsh criticism of civilization.

Erik Vassenden is professor of Nordic literature at the University of Bergen.

Johs Hjellbrekke

Literary Space and Subspaces. Political Position Takings During WW2 in Literary Subspaces.

Previous analyses have revealed that the Norwegian space of literary practices was structured along three main dimensions: fiction vs. non-fiction, modern literature vs traditional literature, and popular literature/children’s books vs. other forms of literature (Hjellbrekke & al. 2024, under review). Fiction vs. non-fiction was strongly linked to the agents’ volumes of educational capital, and the modern vs. traditional opposition was structured according to class origins and class divisions. The relations between the space of literary practices and the space of position takings during WW II were also strong. Whereas resistance writers would more often be found in the modern, upper class and youngest sectors of the space, overt NS supporters and collaborators were more often located in the traditional, older and lower class/farmer origin sectors of the same space. But the literary subspace constituted by the NS supporters and collaborators, did not mirror those found in the global space. The internal cleavages were also stronger, indicating that distinct oppositions and hierarchies were at work.

Less is known about the oppositions in other relevant, literary subspaces, e.g. “Nynorsk” vs “Bokmål” writers, urban vs. rural writers, male vs. female writers etc. Based on prosopographical data on 308 authors active in Norway during the 1930s and 40s, by way of MCA and CSA (Hjellbrekke 2018) and inspired by Bourdieu’s field theory (Bourdieu 2021) and by Sapiro’s work on France (Sapiro 1996, 1999, 2006), this presentation will do a systematic investigation of the relations between the global space of literary practices and the various subspaces, and how political position taking varied within and between these subspaces.   

Keywords:  Literary field, Subspaces World War II, Class Specific MCA, Cluster Analysis, Relational analysis. 

Johs Hjellbrekke is professor of sociology at the University of Bergen. 

Parallel sections:

Jennifer Harvey

The Modernism/Fascism Nexus: Nation, History, and Form in the Modernist War Poem 

Modernism and fascism may seem opposed, but recent scholarship has laid bare their profound interrelation, rendering an examination of their relation, which Barbara Will terms the “modernism/fascism nexus,” a sine qua non of any assessment of modernist poetry. This paper therefor seeks to assess modernist poetry through a conceptualisation of this nexus, questioning the extent to which poetic formalisation is linked to the nationalisation and historicisation inherent within fascist ideologies of palingenesis.

Drawing on the wartime writings of Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, and Gertrude Stein, modernist poets who grappled with the question of foundation, or the historical “ground zero” suddenly imposed by the interwar and postwar periods, this paper examines the problematic and misunderstood relationships between poetic form, the nation form, and history as a narrative form, complicating the possible vectors along which they have been and can be broken apart. While Pound’s sympathy for Mussolini is both historically well-documented and explored in The Cantos (1962), Gertrude Stein’s relationship to fascism remains more tenuous, having been chronicled through her support of Franco during the Spanish Civil War, comments about Hitler getting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938, and hinted at by her conservatism in Wars I Have Seen (1945). Auden, unequivocally anti-fascist, grappled with questions of history and historicisation early on, like Pound, turning away from them eventually to posit a divorce between poetry and history, like Stein.

Privileging these concerns rather than poetries of nationalism or national identity, this comparative study raises critical questions about quietism and the aestheticisation of politics, the mythological role of the poet as founder, and the self-production of literary history within the remit of a global horizon.

Jennifer Harvey is a PhD student in anglophone literature at the Université de Lille.

Erin Small Capistrano:

The intersection of journalism, performance and censorship in the play Ethiopia (1936), a “Living Newspaper” created in the wake of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

This paper explores the intersection of journalism, performance and censorship in the play Ethiopia (1936), a “Living Newspaper” created in the wake of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. It was the first Living Newspaper developed by the US government-funded Federal Theatre Project (FTP), as well as the project’s first major confrontation with the government over censorship. I argue that Ethiopia and the other Living Newspapers were shaped by a complex interaction of leftist artistic and political influences, government support and censorship, and reactionary elements within both the government and society at large. Initially, this paper examines how the Living Newspapers fused experimental Soviet and European agitprop techniques with popular American performance forms and news media. It then argues that this fusion enabled Ethiopia to analyze and critique political rhetoric and dramatize tensions between collective and individual power. Finally, the paper illustrates that while Ethiopia examined the effects of political ideologies abroad, the play was itself shaped by ideological and political pressures at home. Wary of being seen to condone (and indeed fund) criticism of Mussolini, the US government banned the depiction of foreign heads of state onstage in FTP productions, effectively censoring Ethiopia. The project went on to create other, extremely popular, Living Newspapers, but was accused of spreading anti-American communist propaganda by both the conservative press and influential politicians. While the form of the Living Newspapers created subversive possibilities for political critique, it was also marked by compromise and conflicting understandings of the American public’s capacity for political action.

Bio

Erin Small Capistrano is a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo, working on a project entitled “Theatre of Citation: Documentary Theatre & the Political Spectator” as part of the Forms of Resistance research group. Originally from the US, she worked as a dramaturg, performer and educator in NYC before moving to Norway. She has a BA from Yale University and an MA from King’s College, London. Her work focuses on the relationship between theatre and politics, and the ways in which aesthetic forms are shaped by, and occasionally intervene in, their sociopolitical contexts.

Alvhild Dvergsdal.

Nazi rhetoric in Knut Hamsun’s political prose in the 1930s?

In 1933, after finishing the August trilogy, Hamsun put aside novel writing and concentrated on political writings. We don’t know if he ever read Hitler’s Mein Kampf and he didn’t read or understand German. But he read newspapers and books and was highly interested in national, European and world politics in general, Hitler’s and Quisling’s projects in particular. I will present a small study in Hamsun’s rhetoric 1933 – 1940, concentrating on some key expressions recognizable from Nazi propaganda. Main literature will be Klemperer 1947, Süskind 1968, Schmitz-Berning 2000.

Alvhild Dvergsdal is director of research at the Hamsun center at Hamarøy.

Diana Gor.

The Contraband Ukrainian Translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm

George Orwell’s Animal Farm faced many obstacles in its publication. While Western leftists believed in Stalin’s USSR, Orwell rejected this naïvete, resulting in one of the most revelatory allegories for Stalinism being written. However, as the West supported the Soviet Union following the defeat of Hitler, Orwell’s acclaimed novel was rejected by both conservative and liberal publishers alike for its audacious criticism of England’s ally before its 1945 publication. Simultaneously, Ukrainian refugees in German Displaced Persons camps bordered between two systems: the West– which would forcefully repatriate them to the USSR– and the Soviet Union– which would imprison them for fleeing. By 1946, Animal Farm reached Polish-born Ihor Ševčenko, a Ukrainian seeking to help his countrymen, and received permission from Orwell to translate the book into Ukrainian in 1947, resulting in Kolhosp tvaryn [Collective Farm of the Animals]. A reference to Collectivization, Kolhosp tvaryn provided hope to Ukrainian DPs as it acknowledged the truth of Stalinism, and consequently became contraband as 1500-3000 copies were destroyed by occupying forces. Through archival material and correspondence, this presentation will consider: why was nearly half of the Ukrainian translation’s print run destroyed while Animal Farm translations later became a weapon of the Cold War? Why do both Ševčenko’s translation and Orwell’s fairytale continue to return to readers as censorship evolves and regresses? It will also trace the long-standing history and circulation of Kolhosp tvaryn and Animal Farm to reflect on the impact of censorship in the context of resurfacing political extremism across the globe.

Oleksandr Avramchuk.

The Exiled Mind. Anti-Soviet Defectors, Munich Institute, and the Cold War Politics of Knowledge

Amidst the Cold War’s ideological battle, a unique confluence of Eastern European exiles and American anti-communism emerged, centered around the Munich Institute for the Study of the USSR. This paper uncovers the story of non-Russian, mostly Ukrainian, exile intellectuals, who served not just as anti-Soviet defectors but as crucial allies in the West’s ideological struggle against Soviet power. With its roots deeply embedded in the fertile soil of political exile, the Institute’s mission spanned over two decades (1950-1971), reflecting the evolving American stance on the Soviet future. Backed by the CIA, it became a hub of intellectual and cultural resistance, leveraging the diverse backgrounds and insights of Soviet defectors to inform Western intelligence and shape the U.S. machine of political warfare.

The Institute made multiple contributions, enhancing the West’s understanding of Soviet matters on issues ranging from history and sociology to literary politics and science, as well as supporting the efforts of clandestine broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain. This intersection of exile efforts and American initiatives unveils a rich mosaic of ideological, political, and cultural conflicts, providing a novel viewpoint on the Cold War dynamics and the role of intellectuals in tumultuous times. It serves as a litmus test of the fragility of liberal democracy in the face of totalitarian dictatorships, the conditionality of freedom of speech and the widespread censorship across the Iron Curtain. The rise and fall of the Institute underscore the complex and shifting perceptions of foes and allies by the U.S., reflecting the ambiguous and fluctuating politics of knowledge during the Cold War.

Oleksandr Avramchuk

John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

avramchukop@gmail.com

Kamilla Aslaksen:

On women’s freedom of speech

Women in the Global North experience a high degree of equality and absence of discrimination compared to women in other parts of the world. This is also true for their ability to express themselves freely.

However, in May 2023,the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, expressed concern about the decrease in women’s freedom of assembly and freedom of speech without intimidation or coercion in several countries in the Global North. According to Ansalem, the tactics to silence women range from public shaming such as online smear campaigns, to institutional reprisals through provisions that criminalize hate speech. Freedom of speech for women in academia is a particular concern:

Measures that I find particularly concerning include reprisals [against researchers and academics] such as censorship, legal harassment, loss of jobs, loss of income, removal from social media platforms, speaking engagements and the refusal to publish research conclusions and articles. (Ansalem, 2023)

In this paper, I will present and discuss Ansalem’s statement, where I also investigate the background for her concerns. What are the impulses and motifs behind the silencing of women in the Global North today? Is this development associated to greater ideological shifts? Is there a connection between the silencing of women and new media technology?

This paper is part of a work in progress where I investigate women’s freedom of speech in a historical perspective. The claim is that, although the methods vary, we see perpetual silencing of women through shifting times. 

Anslalem, R. (2023) “Allow women and girls to speak on sex, gender and gender identity without intimidation or fear.” Statement by Ms. Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/05/allow-women-and-girls-speak-sex-gender-and-gender-identity-without

Biography:

The presenter is Associate Professor in Nordic literature with PhD in Library and Information Studies and MA in Scandinavian studies. She has published numerous articles on book history, “The Modern Breakthrough” in Scandinavian literature and gender in literature. In 2020-2022 se made the bibliography of Hamsun’s book collection at Nørholm.

Key words
Freedom of speech, democracy, women’s rights, silencing,  cancel culture

Ronny Spaans

New Norwegian Poets of the interwar years and the political impulses from the Folk high school 

‘All England is a fairy tale to me. And the evil they have done, others would have done to a greater degree’. The poet Olav Nygard writes this in a letter to Hulda Garborg. On the other hand, the fellow poet Tore Ørjasæter, Germany was a literary and ideological ideal. In this article, I examine what ideological and political concepts young New Norwegian poets, with a background in rural Norway, adopted during their years of study in the Folk high schools in the beginning of the last century. I will show that the various impulses these poets received from the Folk high schools had a lot to say for their political and literary development. In Olav Nygard’s case, the English teacher at Ørsta Folk high school, Olav Åsmundstad, was an important inspiration for his love of British culture. When Tore Ørjasæter met the German Minister of Science, Education and National Culture, Bernhard Rust, in 1936, he referred to Rust’s interest in soil and heritage as coinciding with ‘our folk high school vision’. Besides Olav Nygard and Tore Ørjasæter, I discuss poets such as Olav Aukrust, Henrik Rytter and Peter Munheim.

Ronny Spaans is Professor in Nordic Literature at the University of Oslo. In 2015 he earned his PhD at the same university with a thesis on the poetry of the Dutch writer Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620–1695). The thesis appeared in 2020 as a monograph at Amsterdam University Press with the title: Dangerous Drugs. The Self-Presentation of the Merchant-Poet Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620–1695). He is currently working on a project on the early modern Norwegian writer Petter Dass. Dr. Spaans has also done research on New-Norwegian literature in the interwar period, as the Shakespeare-translations of Henrik Rytter.

Leiv Sem

Brothers in arms? The Christian Fascism, Psalms and Religious Poetry of Dagfinn and Ludvig Daae Zwilgmeyer.

The brothers Dagfinn and Ludvig Daae Zwilgmeyer were both priests and members of a family of clerics, writers and politicians. Both sided with the Nazi Government during the occupation, and became central in the New Order church, Ludvig as an ardent NS bishop, Dagfinn as bishop and editor of a new psalm book commissioned by the NS. The brothers developed and represented a Norwegian form of Christian Fascism, based on ideas of Norse tradition and the Nordic cultural landscape, of authority and the need for spiritual rejuvenation. They promoted these ideas as priests, as politicians — and also as poets: Both also wrote hymns, Dagfinn also published a treaty on The Norwegian Psalm in 1942. 

In this paper I will discuss their ideas and works with focus on their literary production and its reception.  

Leiv Sem is professor of Cultural History at Nord University

Carlo de Nuzzo.

Ideology and right-wing intellectuals’ European nationalism neofascism

It is wrong to think that the European far right has remained aloof from the cultural debate on Europe. On the contrary, in extreme right-wing circles there has always been a intense debate on the nature and shape of Europe, where a specific mythical and cultural construction of a neo-fascist Europe has developed.

The theme of European integration was used by Italian fascism and the Third Reich, exploiting and manipulating a number of historical and cultural references, such as Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Europe and historical and intellectual figures like Charlemagne, Napoleon, Nietzsche, etc.

Political thought, in its various shades and tendencies of European nationalism, had already mapped out the path towards the revolutionary political unification of the continent, at least from Schmitt and Haushofer to Jünger and Thiriart, via Drieu La Rochelle, Bardèche and Brasillach.

But after the ideological and military defeat of fascism and Nazism in the Second World War there is a clear necessity, on the part of neo-fascist intellectuals, for the elaboration of a new idea of the European nation.

European neo-fascist nationalism, which conceives of Europe as a myth takes up on the one hand the fascist tradition, the rexist tradition of Léon Degrelle, and above all the Nazi tradition of the Neuordnung; and on the other hand the new theoretical-ideological reworkings of the post-war period in opposition to the Yalta partition, for a united Europe not subordinated to American and Soviet politico-military influence.

My contribution aims to give an overview of the construction of the ideology of European nationalism by neo-fascist intellectuals.

Bio

I hold a Master’s degree in History from the Università degli Studi di Milano and I recently obtained my PhD in political science from Sciences Po (2023) on the comparative history of citizenship in France and Italy. My research interests also encompass national identity, fascism and neo-fascism in Europe. I currently work as a teaching assistant at Sciences Po Paris, and prior to this position as a research and teaching assistant at the University of Lille. My research interests are: History of citizenship, fascism, neo-fascism, far and radical right in Europe.

Sofie Arneberg and Lars Johnsen

On big data, digital readings and ideas for the WV project. 

How can we use text mining to identify traits or describe the literature of Norwegian writers before and during World War II? How can a statistical analysis of the writers’ political and aesthetical position taking in the 1930s and 40s be used as a steppingstone for new studies into a literary epoch?

We will combine the variables from the Words and Violence project’s newly constructed detailed data base, with features from a textual analysis of the writers’ literary production of the period.  The project data base consists of information on 308 writers active in Norway during the 1930s and 40s. The textual data is provided by DH-lab of the National Library of Norway:  Based on new bibliographies, a corpus consisting of the literary works of the 308 writers, approximately 3000 books, was built and studied using the tools available at DH-lab.

The combination of statistical investigation methods on one front and literary text mining on the other has the potential to yield valuable insights. This convergence allows for the testing of specific assumptions while simultaneously giving rise to new questions about the material.

Sofie Arneberg and Lars Johnson are researchers in digital humanities at the National Library of Norway, in Oslo.

War, Literature and the return og ideology

Programme

Tuesday, June 4

18:00 Litteratursalen, Stormen bibliotek, Bodø.

Screening of the film Weimar Express (Bulgaria 2023, 1h 15min)

A documentary about Joseph Goebbels’ Europäische Schriftstellervereinigung (European Writer’s Union) and three writers who supported the new cultural order of Nazi-Germany, Fani Popova-Mutafova, Robert Brasillach and Knut Hamsun.  

19:15 Director Milena Fuchedjieva in conversation with researchers Tore Rem, Alvhild Dvergsdal and Gisèle Sapiro. Host: Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen.

20:45 End

21:15 Boat to Kjerringøy (1 h).

22:15 Late night meal (Fish soup). 

Wednesday, June 5

Site:     Kjerringøy Bryggehotell (https://www.kjerringoybryggehotell.no/)

09:15 Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen – Welcome, practicalities and introductory lecture.

10:05 Technical break. 

10:15  Sections
Section A, Chair Leiv Sem.

Jennifer Harvey – Modernism After Fascism?: Nation, History, and Form in the Modernist War Poem.

Erin Small Capistrano – Resistance from the Archives: Journalism, Performance and Censorship in the Federal Theatre Project’s Ethiopia (1936).

Alvhild Dvergsdal – Nazi rhetoric in Knut Hamsun’s political prose in the 1930s?                                            

Section B, Chair Tanja Ellingsen. 

Diana Gor – The Contraband Ukrainian Translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Oleksandr Avramchuk – The Exiled Mind. Anti-Soviet Defectors, Munich Institute, and the Cold War Politics of Knowledge.

Kamilla Aslaksen – On women’s freedom of speech.

12:00  Lunch 

13:15  Early afternoon section, Chair Pål Halvorsen.

Anders Engberg-Pedersen – Inventing WWIII. Ideology, Warfare, and the Securitization of the Novel.

14:00 Alan Finlayson – A Hero’s Journey? Ideological Entrepreneurs and Reactionary Digital Politics.

14:45 Tanja Ellingsen – From Fascism to Traditionalism: The Legacy of Interwar Intellectuals and the New Far Right.

15:25 Coffee/tea 

15:45. Late afternoon section, Chair Kjetil Jakobsen.

Eve Gianoncelli – On the Culture Battlefield: Sexual Conservatism and Metapolitics.

Valentin Behr (with Eve) – Variations of Metapolitics: France, Italy, and Poland in perspective.

16:30 Iryna Shuvalova – Poetry at War. Resilience and Resistance in Ukrainian Writing.

17:00  Narve Fulsås – The economics and culture of Kjerringøy trading post. 

17:30 Village on foot with guided visit of Kjerringøy manor.

19:30 Conference Dinner.

21:00 Reading by Iryna Shuvalova plus musician.

22:00 Hot tub/sauna & midnight sun swim in the sea.

Thursday June, 6 

09:00 Morning section, Chair Narve Fulsås

Rachel Potter – ‘A sort of little United Nations’: International P.E.N.

09:45 Gisèle Sapiro & Peter McDonald – Conversation: A Discourse on Method:

Innovative words, Internationalism, Violence, and Peace, 1921-1946. 

10:40 Coffee/Tea

10:50 Andreas Hedberg and Michelle Kelly – The Shifting Valence of Swedish

Neutrality and the Autonomous Literary Sphere in PEN International and Swedish PEN.

11:30 Tore Rem – Knut Hamsun from Kjerringøy to the Ossietzky debate.

12:00  Discussion.

12:15 Lunch    

13:30 Erik Vassenden – Chapter the Last (1923/ Engl. 1929) – Knut Hamsun’s final solution and its critical reception.

14:10 Ronny Spaans – New Norwegian Poets and the political impulses from the Folk high school.

14:40 Carlo de Nuzzo – Ideology and right-wing intellectuals’ European nationalism neofascism.

15:10 Sofie Arneberg and Lars Johnsen – On big data, digital reading and ideas for the WV project.                          

15:40  Coffee/tea

16:00 Closing lecture by Johs Hjellbrekke – Oppositions in literary spaces and subspaces 1940-1945. A geometric data analysis.

16:45 Plenary discussions.
Open discussion of central topics and questions from the conference. Introduction by Kjetil A. Jakobsen.

17:30 End of program.

Evening transport to Bodø 

18:30 Boat to Bodø with sightseeing (for those who stay the night in Bodø). 

Important notice: If you have a plane to catch in the evening, there is a public bus via ferry from Kjerringøy at 16:45 arriving Bodø Airport at 17:57. Flights for Oslo, Trondheim, or Tromsø in the evening. 

Public transport by bus and ferry from Bodø to Kjerringøy island only rarely.
If possible, please travel with the group, by the boat that we provide.  

The airport is a ten minute walk (!) from Stormen Library and Scandic Havet Hotel in Bodø center. The railway station is also in the city center.

For practical questions: Ivar.p.bakke@nord.no 

For questions concerning academic matters: kjetil.jakobsen@nord.no 

Joining the conference:

A limited number of places for non-presenters are available. If you wish to participate please contact ivar.p.bakke@nord.no. Please make clear if you wish to stay overnight or just participate in daytime proceedings.

Prices: 

Fee for day visitors: 600 NOK per day. 

Includes conference lunch and servings of coffee/tea and cakes/snacks.

Fee for day visit, including accommodation: 1795 NOK per day. 

Includes conference lunch and servings of coffee/tea and cakes/snacks and accommodation at Kjerringøy Bryggehotel.

Publication 

Participants are encouraged to send their article manuscripts to a special issue of Acta Sociologica on “Authoritarianism and Culture”.  This is the call: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00016993241232810