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Bo G EkelundProfessor

About me

Bo G. Ekelund received his PhD from Uppsala University in May 1995. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of English in Uppsala from 1996 to 2000. Since the summer of 2000 he has been a senior lecturer at Stockholm University, and was promoted to Professor of English Literature in 2021. Ekelund's dissertation, In the Pathless Forest: John Gardner's Literary Project, dealt with the US writer John Gardner, best known for novels like Grendel (1971) and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972). However, more than a study of a single author and his works, the dissertation used John Gardner as a lens through which changes in the US literary field from the late 1950s to the early 1980s could be explored. This interest in literary generations and large-scale shifts is present in the research project "Literary Generations and Social Authority," funded by the National Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, which analyzed three cohorts of US prose fiction writers (955 authors), seeking to describe and explain the changing social status of literary authors in the United States during 60 years of the so-called American Century. In an on-going research project with the working title "Studies in an Undead Culture: Scenes of Recognition in literature and politics 1980-2000," Ekelund critically explores of the notion of "recognition" in late 20th-century politics, theory, and literature. The study discusses the politics of identity, the debates over recognition and redistribution, and analyzes the structure of fictional "recognition" in a number of narratives. Ekelund has studied the field of Swedish translations and the reception of international theory by Swedish literary scholars in two research projects funded by the Swedish Research council, “Languages, Education, and Swedish Society 1960-2010” and “Transnational Strategies within Higher Education. Sweden´s Relations to France and the US, 1919-2009.” Most recently the focus of Ekelund’s research has been Caribbean Anglophone fiction and territorial claims in literature, first in a project titled “Geography, society and the symbolic terrain of Anglophone Caribbean fiction,” funded by the Swedish Research Council, and then as a member of the large RJ-funded research program “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literature.”  All of these research projects are marked by an adherence to a tradition of critical social theory, in recent times most forcefully represented by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Dots on the Literary Map?

    2018. Bo G. Ekelund. Ariel 49 (2-3), 1-36

    Article

    This article intervenes in scholarly debates about postcolonial space by demonstrating the distinctive strengths of Geometric Data Analysis (GDA) as an approach to literary space that skirts both close and distant reading modes. I use GDA to map the fictional space of Trinidadian author Earl Lovelace's short story A Brief Conversion, offering a more complete and systematic account than earlier readings. I argue that the theoretical stakes of this sort of analysis reside in the distinction between what I call the wealth of place and the value of place, terms inspired by Marxist value critique. Despite its best intentions, literary criticism tends to get caught up in the logic of valorization, putting into circulation place as a value, dissociated from the wealth of place that the literary work (in the best of cases) produces. From these theoretical starting points, I assert that geometric methods can stay truer to the wealth of place by disclosing the space of possibles created by the literary text, thus restoring to the storyworld a sense of its dynamic and open orientations.

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  • Worldly vernaculars in the Anglophone Caribbean

    2018. Bo G. Ekelund. World Literatures, 150-161

    Chapter

    Returning to the canonical opposition between Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite as an illustration, this essay argues that the rendering of place is an indispensable category for studying the tensions between cosmopolitan and vernacular orientations, as instanced in the work of these poets. More particularly, different strategies are associated with distinct forms of claiming place, and vice versa. Both Walcott and Brathwaite can be seen as affirming the local – “the smaller place” – at the expense of the “larger world”, but they do so by means of their access to the distant places their poems register. The essay ends up holding up a full matrix engendering a rich set of possibilities: the smaller place may be claimed with cosmopolitan means or in the vernacular; the larger world may be invested with cosmopolitan expressivity or with vernacular forms.

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  • Citing the world

    2016. Bo G. Ekelund. Poetics (Amsterdam. Print) 55, 60-75

    Article

    The academic study of literature constitutes one institutional site for the production and reproduction of conceptions of literature. In a semi-peripheral country such as Sweden, this production partly relies on foreign intellectual goods. To analyze this transnational dimension of Swedish scholarship in a period marked by increasing internationalization, a Geometric Data Analysis (GDA) (Le Roux & Rouanet, 2004) was carried out on the bibliographies of 318 PhD dissertations, defended in the period 1980-2005, at Swedish departments of literary studies (litteraturvetenskap). The analysis of citational choices showed only an insignificant increase in the reliance on foreign sources in this period. The GDA revealed how these privileged references were distributed in a tripolar opposition, reflecting fundamentally different conceptions of literature, interpreted in this study as the three poles of textual singularity, secular particularity and anthropological universality. The analysis of supplementary variables shows that these oppositions are subtended by different geolinguistic orientations and that they correlate strongly with gender, which is overwhelmingly in evidence as one moves from the male-dominated textual pole to the strongly feminist and female social pole of the first axis. The lack of increasing internationalization measured by citations is attributed to the national cultural mission of these departments.

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  • American Stars 'n' bards, and Swedish Reviewers

    2008. Bo G. Ekelund. American Studies in Scandinavia 40 (02-jan), 140-164

    Article

    This article looks at the way U.S. authors were received by Swedish practical criticism in the period 1980-2005. After a quantitative overview of the U.S. authors and genres that were given attention in Swedish review media in this period, the article discusses discrepancies between the original U.S. and the Swedish recognition. One particularly interesting case is the very favorable reception of Paul Auster's work, which functioned as a confirmation of the postmodern breakthrough in the Swedish literary field. What the introduction of Auster shows is how Swedish critics function as intermediaries who represent what Pascale Casanova has identified as the ""national"" and the ""international"" poles of the literary field. Since Swedish criticism is in the peculiar position of representing a peripheral literary field that nevertheless controls a central consecrating instance, the Nobel Prize, it call be argued that the strategies of the most autonomous critics are always to some extent oriented in relation to the struggles between the world literary centers. The Swedish critic Aris Fioretos' introduction and intraduction of Paul Auster is, in that regard, a pertinent illustration of the cosmopolitan trajectory required for the fulfillment of the role of introduktor (""introducer""), a particularly significant function in afield that contains the Prize-awarding Academy.

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