My research concerns the functions of literature at boundaries, such as between languages, nations, arts and media. I have particularly studied modern literature's engagement with the Byzantine Orthodox Christian tradition, from the various perspectives of cultural semiotics (2011), intermedial studies (2013), and translation studies (2002), including aspects of multilingualism.

As a participant in the research programme World Literatures – Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics, I have been working on a subproject focussing on Constantinople (today's Istanbul) around 1900, when it was a multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual city with a diversity of writing systems, being not only of aesthetic but also of political, ideological, religious and linguistic interest to writers.

Research networks: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII), Diversity in Nordic Literature (DINO), and Nordic Byzantine Network (NBN).

 

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Narrating the crisis of Constantinople 1908–1922: A lost world in Greek, Armenian, Turkish and Russian

  2022. Helena Bodin. Literature and the Making of the World, 15-49

  Chapter

  Bodin explores a case of literary world-making which transgresses the languages of national literatures. She examines four novels by Theotokas in Greek, Yessayan in Armenian, Edib Adıvar in Turkish and Zdanevich in Russian. They are all set in Constantinople between 1908 and 1922, a period which meant a protracted political crisis for the then still multilingual, multi-ethnic and multireligious city. By positing Constantinople’s narrated site before the fall of the Ottoman Empire as a Bakhtinian chronotope of threshold, Bodin studies how time and space are fused with language and agency in the selected novels. Irrespective of the author’s ethnicity or the novel’s language, the analyses demonstrate that the novels deploy displaced narration, and that they recollect or reclaim a lost world. Thereby, the act of writing itself is challenged, questioned or interrupted. Together, these novels make a linguistically multifaceted contribution to world literature and crafts Constantinople as a literary world.

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• Nordic Literary Translingualism

  2022. Julie Hansen, Helena Bodin. The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism, 165-176

  Chapter

  This chapter surveys the diverse landscape of literary translingualism in the Nordic region. A brief overview of contemporary language situations in the Nordic countries is followed by an examination of translingual aspects of the work of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Edith Södergran, Karen Blixen, and Kjartan Fløgstad. The subsequent sections discuss trends in Nordic literary translingualism from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, focusing in particular on postcolonial contexts, minority literatures, and migration. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how works by Tomas Tranströmer, Caroline Bergvall, and Cia Rinne invite translingual readings.

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• The Gunnar Ekelöf Room and the Poet’s Widow as Archivist and Author

  2022. Helena Bodin. Transforming Author Museums, 154-176

  Chapter

  The Gunnar Ekelöf Room is a reconstructed memorial museum of the late home of the Swedish modernist poet at the Sigtuna Foundation not far from Stockholm. While Gunnar Ekelöf’s original manuscripts are archived at Uppsala University Library, their copies are accessible in the duplicate so-called Home Archive, set up by his widow Ingrid Ekelöf and housed in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room, as is also the extensive correspondence between her and the literary critic Brita Wigforss. Guided by cultural memory studies and archival studies which regard archives and writers’ houses as texts and media, this chapter explores how the Home Archive through this correspondence recounts its own origin, thereby offering new aspects of the metonymic principles that generally guide archival work.

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• From Adam to Tsar' Kosmos: Cosmopolitanism in the Byzantine Tradition

  2021. Helena Bodin. Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures (JOLCEL) 5, 28-51

  Article

  Setting out from the short dialogue in which the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, upon being asked “Where are you from?,” replied “I am a citizen of the world” (a cosmopolitan), the purpose of this article is to explore cosmopolitanism in Byzantine tradition, which surpasses the actual empire in both space and time and includes even later Orthodox Christian practices. This is done by considering its significance for literary world-making within the framework of languages used in Byzantine tradition, most importantly Greek. Textual examples from the first centuries AD, of importance for later discussions in Byzantium, present Adam, Moses and Christian believers as citizens of the world (cosmopolitans). In subsequent examples from the twelfth century, Orthodox Christian monks are instead called citizens of heaven (ouranopolitans), and the Constantinopolitan writer John Tzetzes records the many languages of the capital of the empire, which often has been described as a cosmopolitan city. Furthermore, examples of hymnography, homilies, and icons from the Orthodox Christian celebration of Pentecost are examined. The Pentecostal miracle offers a multilingual event which unites and enlightens kosmos in contrast to the confusion of tongues in Babel. As a whole, the article is inspired by discussions of cosmopolitanism as a travelling concept and as a controversial concept that encompasses both unity and plurality. It is proposed that cosmopolitanism in Byzantine tradition borders between homogenising (monolingual) and heterogenising (multilingual) modes.

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• "So let me remain a stranger": Multilingualism and Biscriptalism in the Works of Finland-Swedish Writer Tito Colliander

  2020. Helena Bodin. The Aesthetics and Politics of Linguistic Borders, 242-262

  Chapter

  This chapter examines the intriguing multimodal genre of "biscriptalism". It ties also into the role of the reader in the construction of literary multilingualism. The Finland-Swedish, polyglot writer Tito Colliander's memoirs show how Colliander embodied the three roles of author, translator and stranger in the Orthodox Christian diaspora, in both Finland and Estonia, ever since his decision to become a Russian-Orthodox Christian. The use of spoken Russian and Cyrillic script is analysed in order to discuss what these devices meant for Colliander's poetics and identity, also taking into account religion as an important parameter of diversity in the study of literary multilingualism and translingual life writing. It is demonstrated that the experience of translating, mediating and going in-between is crucial to Colliander's life and work: multilingualism and biscriptalism play decisive roles in his diaspora Orthodox Christian identity, but the reader is also invited to continue this task of the translator and to experience the in-betweenness of Colliander's stranger.

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• Flerspråkig litteratur och läsare i interaktion

  2020. Julia Tidigs, Helena Bodin. Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning 107 (3), 144-151

  Article

  Gästredaktörerna Julia Tidigs' och Helena Bodins introduktion till specialnumret "Flerspråkig litteratur och läsare i interaktion".

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• Gudsföderskan som källa i bysantinska hymner

  2020. Helena Bodin. Signum (8), 17-23

  Article

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• Skriftens roll i skådespelet: Flerspråkighet och flerskriftlighet i Göran Tunströms Chang Eng

  2020. Helena Bodin. Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning 107 (3), 196-210

  Article

  Artikeln undersöker användningen av flerspråkighet och flerskriftlighet i bokutgåvan av Göran Tunströms drama Chang Eng. Ett skådespel (1987). Dramat tar upp det siamesiska tvillingparet Chang och Eng Bunker (1811–1874) och deras livshistoria, inklusive den freakshow (missfostercirkus) där de uppträdde. Med fokus på skådespelets användning av flerspråkighet (svenska, engelska, franska och thai) och flerskriftlighet (latinskt alfabet och thaiskrift) visas hur skriftens visuellt-spatiala modalitet och bokmediets materialitet gör läsningen av Chang Eng till ett skådespel som utspelar sig på boksidorna. Härvid är också den av dramats personer som kallas Romanen viktig. Kunskapen om Tunströms synsätt, presenterat i Under tiden (1993), att ord är skrift och att ord är kroppsliga leder fram till att en läsare som jag, som annars inte behärskar thai, kan läsa ut skådespelets avslutande ord i thaiskrift. Den heterografiska relationen mellan de båda skriftsystemen inom bokens materiella form speglar Changs och Engs sammanvuxna, enda kropp – Chang Eng.

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• ‘The clamour of Babel, in all the tongues of the Levant’: multivernacular and multiscriptal Constantinople around 1900 as a literary world

  2020. Helena Bodin. Textual Practice 34 (5), 783-802

  Article

  With a focus on the crafting of Constantinople as a literary world, this article considers how the city’s particularly rich and composite soundscape, linguascape and scriptworld around 1900 contributes to a vernacular poetics. Such a poetics, I suggest, could be described in terms of a heterolingual and multivernacular foregrounding of linguistic difference and asymmetry. Issues relating to the materiality of language and linguistic diversity, including the role of scripts, are explored in a selection of ten Western European travelogues and narratives set in Constantinople during the last period of the Ottoman era (1876–1922) and written in Italian (De Amicis), French (Loti), Danish (Jerichau-Baumann), Norwegian (Skram), and Swedish (Lindberg-Dovlette and Beyel). Proceeding from the soundscape via the linguascape to the scriptworld of the city, it is demonstrated how these ‘-scapes’ and worlds are established, rendered, thematised, transcribed, and inscribed as heterolingual, multivernacular and multiscriptal in Constantinople as a literary world. Different textual and paratextual strategies are identified and analysed with regard to their auditory, visual and material features. However, as a part of monoscriptal Western European literature using Roman script, this literary world becomes cosmopolitanised. In this case the vernacular poetics did not embrace the many scripts of Constantinople.

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  "I Sank through the Centuries": Late Antiquity Inscribed in Göran Tunström's Novel The Thief

  2018. Helena Bodin. Reading Late Antiquity, 225-242

  Chapter

  A unique treasure has been kept in Uppsala University Library in Sweden since the 17th century: the Gothic Codex Argenteus. The aim of this chapter is to examine Göran Tunström's novel Tjuven (1986; The Thief) about a fictive theft of the codex, and its use of Late Antique writing techniques and texts, both real and fictive, from the perspective of cultural memory studies with a particular interest in media studies, guided by Astrid Erll's Memory in Culture (2011), based on semiotic models. The different functions of the codex, the novel and the library, respectively, are discussed as memory media. This is done in order to inquire into the identity of the thief and to demonstrate the importance of media for the plot. Late Antique writing techniques and intertexts, together with the role of the historian Procopius of Caesarea (early 6th century) in the novel are explored. The motif of writing on skin in The Thief, particularly the writing of history on female skin, is examined. By focusing on how Late Antiquity is inscribed in Tunström’s novel, it is demonstrated how the obsession with writing is vital for all these aspects of the mediation of cultural memory.

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• Heterographics as a Literary Device: Auditory, Visual, and Cultural Features

  2018. Helena Bodin. Journal of World Literature 3 (2), 196-216

  Article

  Heterographics (“other lettering”) refers to the use of two scripts in one text or a translation of a text from one script to another. How might the occasional use of heterographics in literary texts highlight issues of cultural diversity? Drawing on intermedial theory and studies of literary multilingualism, literary translation, and pluriliteracies, this article examines various functions of heterographics in selected contemporary literary texts. Examples of embedded Greek, Chinese, Cyrillic, and Arabic script are analysed in works published in Swedish, French, and English between 2004 and 2015, selected because they thematise cultural diversity and linguistic boundaries. The conclusion is that heterographic devices emphasise the heteromediality of literary texts, thereby heightening readers’ awareness of the visual-spatial features of literary texts, as well as of the materiality of scripts. Heterographics influence readers’ experiences of cultural affinity or alterity, that is, of inclusion or exclusion, depending on their access to practices of pluriliteracies.

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Show all publications by Helena Bodin at Stockholm University