Magnus Ullén Professor
Contact
Name and title: Magnus UllénProfessor
Workplace: Department of English Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room E 866Universitetsvägen 10 E, plan 8
Office hours By appointment
Postal address Engelska institutionen106 91 Stockholm
Research group
About me
I received my PhD from Uppsala University in December 2001. I became docent (associate professor) in Comparative Literature at Stockholm University in 2009, and Professor of English at Østfold University College, Norway, and at Karlstad University in 2012, where I worked for ten years. In 2018, I joined the English Department at Stockholm University.
In my spare time, I am an avid record collector with a special fondness for Motown, James Brown, and Christmas music.
My research takes place in the interstices between rhetoric and literary studies. Regardless of whether it deals with canonical literature, such as the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, or controversial phenomena, such as pornography or the concept of political correctness, it insists on situating texts not merely within the cultural context in which they were written, but in relation to the institutional practices and professional beliefs that determine how they are read.
I am the author of The Half-Vanished Structure: Hawthorne’s Allegorical Dialectics (2004), and Bara för dig: pornografi, konsumtion, berättande (“Just for you: pornography, consumption, narrative”) (2009), a study on pornography and narrativity in consumer society, as well as numerous articles on literature, rhetoric, culture studies and literary theory.
a. Monographs
Bara för dig: pornografi, konsumtion, berättande. Stockholm: Vertigo, 2009.
The Half-Vanished Structure: Hawthorne’s Allegorical Dialectics. Peter Lang: Bern, 2004.
b. Edited volumes
”Någonstädes mellan sol och söder, mellan nord och natt.” Festskrift till Torsten Pettersson. Stockholm: Gidlunds, 2015. Red. Jenny Björklund, Ann-Sofie Lönngren, Mattias Pirholt, Magnus Ullén & Maria Wennström Wohrne.
Våldsamma fantasier. Studier i fiktionsvåldets funktion och attraktion. Kulturvetenskapliga skriftserien 2, Karlstads Universitet, 2014.
The Later Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Special Inssue. 35:2 (2009). 1–132. With David Greven. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40196822)
c. Articles
“The Feminist Origins of ‘Political Correctness’: PC terms in JSTOR.” Feminist Theory. (2024) Online 15 May: (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14647001241248752)
“The Ugly Smell of Nortoniensis: Charles Eliot Norton and Hawthorne’s Civil War Romance.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. 67.1 (2021): 591–636. (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/839209)
“Political Correctness in Sweden: A Borderland Conceptual History.” Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations. Eds. Dag Blanck & Adam Hjortén. University of Minnesota Press. 2021. 277–292. (https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv1v3gr1q.18)
“The Art of Judgment: Postcritique and the Particular Case.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 19.4 (2020): 195–217. (https://doi.org/10.35360/njes.608)
“Unfinished Work: Lincoln, Hawthorne, and the Situation of Literature,” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 46.4 (2019): 860–887. (https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2019.0040)
“Fascisten som anti-fascist: Teratologen, kritiken och litteraturen som vara,” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 2–3 (2019): 68–77. (https://doi.org/10.54797/tfl.v49i2-3.6634)
“‘The Elevation of Sensitivity Over Truth’: Political Correctness and Related Phrases in the Time Magazine Corpus.” Applied Linguistics 40.2 (2019): 265–287. With Solveig Granath. (https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/40/2/265/3979153)
“Hawthorne’s Unfinished Romances.” Nathaniel Hawthorne in Context. Ed. Monika Elbert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 2018. 252–261. (https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316271537.025)
“The Problem of Modernity: Hawthorne Criticism, Faith, and the Literary Situation.” Orbis Litterarum 72.4 (2017): 265–293. (https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12135)
“Reading Literature Rhetorically in Education: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Prison-Door’ as an Exercise in Close Reading.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 15.2 (2016):142–158. (10.35360/NJES.367)
“‘A Tangled Web of Mindfuck’: Andrea Dworkin and the Truth of Pornography.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 35.1 (2016): 145–171. (10.1353/tsw.2016.0014)
“The Situation of the Text: Erotic and Pornographic in Barthes’s Camera Lucida.” Critical Quarterly 57.2 (2015): 72–89. (https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12195)
“Kristusprincipen. Om litteraturtolkning och trons retorik.” Samlaren 135 (2014): 129–162. (https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:795205/FULLTEXT01.pdf)
“Utøya 2083: Terror, Performatives, and the Rhetorical Situation.” Narratives of Risk: Interdisciplinary Studies. Eds. Karen Patrick Knutsen, Sigmund Kvam, Peter Langemeyer, Anastasia Parianou, and Kåre Solfjeld. Münster: Waxmann, 2013. 339–363.
“The Solipsism of Pornography: Speech Act Theory and the Anti-Porn Position.” Sexuality and Culture17.2 (2013): 321–347. (10.1007/s12119-012-9154-1)
“The Excess of Porn: Response to Julian Hanich.” Jump Cut 53 (2011). (http://ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/Ullen/index.html)
“Late Hawthorne: A Polemical Introduction.” The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 35:2 (2009). 1–25. With David Greven. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44695488)
“Politikern som politikerföraktare: Thomas Bodströms Rymmaren och den retoriska situationen.” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 2 (2009): 5–19. (https://doi.org/10.54797/tfl.v39i2.12157)
“Pornography and its Critical Reception: Toward a Theory of Masturbation.” Jump Cut 51 (2009). (http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/UllenPorn/)
“Masturbation as a Mode of Reading: Towards a Conception of the Orphaned Texts of Postmodernity.” Carriages and Computers: Aesthetic Technologies in Literature from the 18th to the 21st Century. Eds. Yngve Sandhei Jacobsen och Gunnar Foss. Oslo: Tapir, 2009. 97–109.
“The Manuscript of Septimius: Revisiting the Site of Hawthorne’s ‘Failure’.” Studies in the Novel 40:3 (2008): 239–267. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/29533873)
“Modernism och utopi: Fredric Jameson, Peter Luthersson och litteraturens värde.” Samlaren 128 (2007): 233–264. (https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:39819/FULLTEXT01.pdf)
“Reading with the Eye of Faith: The Structural Principle of Hawthorne’s Romances.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48:1 (2006): 1–36. (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/197262)
“Dream-Cum-Truth: Postmodern Narrativity and Hardcore Porn.” Literature and Visual Culture. Ed. Dagný Kristjánsdóttir. Reykjavik: University of Inceland Press, 2005. 394–408.
“En ironisk historia: Paul de Man och historiebegreppet.” Samlaren 125 (2004): 204–36. (https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:39817/FULLTEXT01.pdf)
“Den obegripliga maskinen: Paul de Man och textens temporalitet.” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 1 (2004): 109–132.
“Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.” The Explicator 59:3 (2001): 128–130. (https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940109597109)
“Dante in Paradise: The End of Allegorical Interpretation.” New Literary History 32:1 (2001): 177–199. (https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2001.0010)
d. Reviews
Anna Hultman. Litteratur vid pornografins gräns. Erotik i svensk prosa 1819–2019. Malmö: Vertigo, 2022. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 53.2–3 (2023): 310–316. (10.54797/tfl.v53i2-3.23680)
“Psychoanalyzing Hawthorne.” David Diamond. Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation. Routledge, 2021. The Henry James Review 43.2 (2022): E-1–E-5. (https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2022.0005)
Sarah Meer. American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, c. 1820–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 47 (2021): 171–175. (https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.47.1.0171)
Ulf Olsson. Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 1-2 (2018): 71–74. (https://doi.org/10.54797/tfl.v48i1-2.7588)
Erik van Ooijen. Dödsporr. Etik, estetik, våld. Stockholm. Faethon, 2016. Samlaren 138 (2017). 264–69. (https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1187269/FULLTEXT01.pdf)
Jeanne Cortiel. With a Barbarous Din: Race and Ethnic Encounter in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. American Studies in Scandinavia. 49.2 (2017): 115–18. (https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v49i2.5680)
Roger Edholm. The Written and the Unwritten World of Philip Roth: Fiction, Nonfiction and Borderline Aesthetics in the Roth Books. Örebro Studies in Literary History and Criticism 12. Örebro 2012. Samlaren 135 (2014): 285–294. (https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:766013/FULLTEXT01.pdf)
Michael Boyden. Predicting the Past: The Paradoxes of American Literary History. Leuven: Leuven UP, 2009. American Studies in Scandinavia 43.2 (2012): 123–126. (https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v43i2.4381)
Anders Johansson. Nonfiction. Göteborg. Glänta 2008. Samlaren 129 (2008): 495–500. (http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:352476/FULLTEXT01.pdf)