Jag undervisar och handleder studenter på samtliga nivåer, ofta kring litteratur och samhälle.

Min doktorsavhandling Framkallning. Skrift, konsumtion och sexualitet i Karin Boyes Astarte och Henry Parlands Sönder (2013) diskuterar två modernistiska romaner, en från Sverige, en från Finland, i relation till deras aktualitet – hur romanerna demonstrerar sig själva som exempel på det samtida och nya 1930. I fokus står konsumtion och varuform; sexualitet och (konsumtions)begär; nya mediaformer som estetiska teknologier; skrivande och allegorisering, dvs. hur romanerna själva reflekterar över hur denna samhällelighet kan skrivas. På så vis försöker avhandlingen precisera de villkor under vilka en samtidsroman blir möjlig.

I min nuvarande forskning inom ramen för Sabbatical, i ett projekt finansierat av Riksbankens jubileumsfond, undersöker jag medborgarskap, ekonomi och biopolitik i skandinavisk 1800-talslitteratur: istället för att läsa romanen som behållare för idéer och ideologier, betraktas de som former av skrivpraktiker vilka konstruerar ett medborgarsubjekt.

I projektet, “The Politics of Border”, studerar jag spatialitet och maktrelationer i nordisk pojk- och flickbok under sent 1800tal med utgångspunkt i postkolonial teori.

Tidigare forskningsprojekt:

Ingick i forskningsprojektet Förtrollande nationer. Varumarknad folklore och nationalism i skandinavisk litteratur 1830-1850, finansierat av Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. I fokus, den roll skönlitteratur, i synnerhet romanen, spelar i spridningen av nationalism och föreställningen om nation i det tidiga 1800-hundratalets Skandinavien. Mitt forskningsområde i projektet kopplar nation till ekonomi: det begynnande konsumtionssamhället och den växande varu- och penningmarknaden, men även till samtida diskurser om politisk ekonomi. Romanen undersöks som teknologi för produktion av medborgerliga subjekt, 2016–2019.

Ingick i forskningsprojektet Allegori, genus, samhälle: funktioner och skrivsätt i svensk 1900-talslitteratur, finansierat av Vetenskapsrådet, medsökande med projektledare prof. Ulf Olsson, 2000­–2004. Min del i projektet resulterade sen i en doktorsavhandling (se ovan).

Publikationer:

Artiklar i tidskrifter:

”Sjukdomens gränsland. Studie av gränsen från två sidor i Torgny Lindgrens roman Hummelhonung”. Samlaren. Tidskrift för forskning och litteratur, årg. 142, 2021, 140: 96–132 (Open Access) https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1643761/FULLTEXT01.pdf

“’To Die for King and Country’: Nationalism and the Citizen Subject from a Perspective of War in Three Poems in Runeberg’s Fänrik Ståls sägner”. Scandinavian Studies, Volume 93, Nr 2, Summer 2021, pp. 187–215 (Open Access)

https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.93.2.0187

“Writing Women on the Verge of Individualization. Citizen Subject, Consumption and Power in the 19th-Century Swedish Epistolary Novel”, NORA–Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 2021, Vol 29, No 1, 17–34 (Open access)

https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2020.1825118

”Medborgarsubjektets ekonomi. Subjektivitet, biomakt och konsumtionsmönster i två tidiga 1800-talsromaner”, Samlaren. Tidskrift för forskning och litteratur, 2019, 140: 57–80 (Open Access) https://svelitt.se/samlaren/2019

”Nationell kroppsekonomi. Statlig kontroll och produktivt begär i Emilie Flygare-Carléns Rosen på Tistelön”, Edda, 2018, 105 (3): 203–218 (Open Access) doi:10.18261/ISSN.1500-1989-2018-03-03 https://www.idunn.no/edda/2018/03/nationell_kroppsekonomi

”Bygdeidyllens gotiska maskineri. Nationell identitet och fluktuerande bytesvärde i Fredrika Bremers I Dalarne.” Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap, (TFL), 2018, 3: 25–39 (Open Access) http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/tfl/article/view/4562/3605

”Förförelsens ekonomi. Om konsumtion i Fredika Bremer’s Famillen H*** och Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Araminta May”, i Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, TFL, 2014, 3-4, 17–26 (Open Access) http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/tfl/article/view/3229/2694

Artiklar i antologier:

”Spegelscen. Allegori och fotografi i Henry Parlands Sönder” in Allegori, estetik, politik. Texter om litteratur, Red. Ulf Olsson, Per Anders Wiktorsson, Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion, 2003, 160–173

”Estetiskt våld. Edith Södergran, offret och den konstnärliga utsagan”, Speglingar. Svensk 1900-talslitteratur i möte med biblisk tradition. Red. Stefan Klint & Kari Syreeni, Skellefteå: Norma, 2001, 31–50

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

• "To Die for King and Country": Nationalism and the Citizen Subject from a Perspective of War in Three Poems in Runeberg's Fänrik Ståls Sägner

  2021. Caroline Haux. Scandinavian Studies 93 (2), 187-215

  Artikel

  ‘“To Die for King and Country”: Nationalism and the Citizen Subject from a Perspective of War in Three Poems in Runeberg’s Fänrik Ståls sägner,’ adopts a transnational perspective in the analyses to show variations in power relations and point to a hybrid author position (Cohen 1997; Bhabha 1990). Yet, the article argues that the citizen is written in the context of war as a subject of patriotism in peacetime (Foucault 2008). Juxtaposed, the poems make visible ways in which the relation between private and collective, people and army, is regulated. This is how the poems expose ways of forming a ‘citizen subject’, which Ètienne Balibar (2016) claims is the foundation of modern subjectivity itself. 

  Läs mer om "To Die for King and Country"

• Writing women on the verge of individuality horizontal ellipsis Citizen subject, consumption and power in the nineteenth-century Swedish novel

  2021. Caroline Haux. NORA 29 (1), 17-34

  Artikel

  Three letter-writing nineteenth-century heroines lay out domestic worlds to their fictional readers in which moral sentiment and norms of citizenship versus individual desire are at stake. In an era of nascent capitalism and nation building, these are aspects of significance. But what role does writing letters play? And what impact do epistolary novels have on citizenship and gender at the time? With Michel Foucault and etienne Balibar as theoretical framework, this article discusses three epistolary novels-The Illusions (1836) by Sophie von Knorring in connection to Grannarne (1837) by Fredrika Bremer and Araminta May (1838) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist-in order to discern how female writing produces the gendered citizen.

  Läs mer om Writing women on the verge of individuality horizontal ellipsis Citizen subject, consumption and power in the nineteenth-century Swedish novel

• Medborgarsubjektets ekonomi: Subjektivitet, biomakt och konsumtionsmönster i två tidiga 1800-talsromaner

  2019. Caroline Haux. Samlaren 140, 57-80

  Artikel

  It is not until the ordinary heroine Fransiska in Fredrika Bremer’s novel Grannarne [The Neighbours] has integrated into her new neighborhood that she can become a truly functional and self-governing individual. And it is only when the young customs officer Arve in Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s Rosen på Tistelön [The Rose of Thistle Island] gets involved in the welfare of the little coastal community that he lives up to his true potential as an autonomous and useful human being. The article discusses the way in which the individual in these novels is formed in a liberal economy. Subjectivation is looked upon from the perspective of Étienne Balibar, who equates the liberal subject with the citizen. Functioning dialectically both as subjugation and agency, subjectivation happens through collectivization.

  Läs mer om Medborgarsubjektets ekonomi

• Bygdeidyllens gotiska maskineri: Nationell identitet och fluktuerande bytesvärde i Fredrika Bremers I Dalarne

  2018. Caroline Haux. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 48 (3), 25-38

  Artikel

  The Country Life Novel’s gothic machinery. National Identity and Fluctuating Exchange Value in Fredrika Bremer’s Life in Dalecarlia

  When Fredrika Bremer in her novel I Dalarne (1845) (Life in Dalecarlia) represents Falu copper mine as the horri c ruin of classic gothic tales: a vast and life-threatening void, the home of dreadful crimes and secret passions, this is paradoxically part of a nationalistic literary strategy. Simultaneously, though, the novel writes the nation as a pastoral on country life and mores of the peasantry. The article investigates how the gothic and the pastoral idyllic respectively establishes the nation and national identity on their separate terms and in relation to each other in accordance with their own particular inner logic.

  The idyllic streaks both manifests and problematizes local place as foundation for national identity, while the gothic exposes identity as arbitrary, and thereby subverts the notion of a citizen subject. This duality is linked to a market-based model of identity which the article argues is actualized by the novel itself. The condition of possibility is the emerging consumer society and the beginnings of industrialism, which the novel also thematises as tradition versus modernity. At stake in this eld of tension between the idyllic and the gothic stands the nation as a community of citizens: a collective subject. 

  Läs mer om Bygdeidyllens gotiska maskineri

• Nationell kroppsekonomi: Statlig kontroll och produktivt begär i Emilie Flygare-Carléns Rosen på Tistelön

  2018. Caroline Haux. Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning 105 (3), 203-217

  Artikel

  National Body Economics. Governmental Control and Productive Desire in Emilie Flygare Carléns The Rose of Tistelön

  When Emilie Flygare-Carlén writes about war between smugglers and customs officials in the archipelago off Bohuslän in the novel Rosen på Tistelön (1842), she also discusses the relationship between civil society and the state and thereby also citizenship and local identity. Rather than focusing on nationalism as ideology, which was actively promoted by authors and intellectuals at the time, my literary example reveals how the nationalist project in the novel presents itself in a way that is contradicted by its own inner logic. The study connects the commodity market with contemporary discourses on political economy. For us readers, these foreign goods recur on several levels in the text. The novel is examined as an event in a specific historical situation: how the novel itself answers the question about the historical moment it poses. Herein lies its actuality.

  Läs mer om Nationell kroppsekonomi

• Förförelsens ekonomi: Om konsumtion i Fredrika Bremers Famillen H*** och Carl Jonas Love Almqvists Araminta May

  2014. Caroline Haux. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 44 (3-4), 17-27

  Artikel

  An Economy of Seduction: On Consumption in Fredrika Bremer’s Famillen H*** and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Araminta May.

  This article discusses consumption in Fredrika Bremer’s Famillen H*** (1830−31) and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Araminta May (1838), it is also considering the function of “seduction” in enticing a potential readership. Despite the differences between these two novels, this article argues that both are permeated by a commodity-logic, which manifests itself in the relation between seductive visibility (exchange value) and labour (use value). The bourgeois world of things made visible in the literary text is described as an effect of a fetishizing of the object due to commodification. In considering the texts in this way, this study also presents a new perspective on early realism. The article aims to show how the novels both speak of their economic “conditions of possibility”, where the fast growing literary market is one condition, and the way in which these novels seek to sell themselves on this market, by means of literary strategies. With a focus on “seduction” the central concern of this article is what literature does rather than what it means. 

  Läs mer om Förförelsens ekonomi

• Framkallning: Skrift, konsumtion och sexualitet i Karin Boyes Astarte och Henry Parlands Sönder

  2013. Caroline Haux.

  Avhandling (Dok)

  This thesis is a comparative study in two novels which both try to understand modern life. The novels were both written between 1929 and 1930 as entries for the same major Nordic novel contest – Astarte in Sweden by Karin Boye, Sönder [To Pieces ]in Finland by the Finno-swedish author Henry Parland.

  This analysis tries to determine what is at stake in these novels by, apart from investigating them as novels in their own right, examining the complex interaction between a specific moment in history and the representation of that moment as literary text. The novels are examined as events in a specific historical situation; that is, how they write what is contemporary into themselves, trough answering the question about the historical moment that they themselves formulate. Four issues are fundamental to the study: The function of consumption and the commodity form in the novels. The way in which these novels render sexuality and desire. How other media forms function as aesthetic technologies for the novels. Lastly, aesthetics, writing and allegory: how the novels reflect on the possibility of representing this societal moment in history.

  A focus in the analysis is how woman is called forth as golden statue and photography, how she by letting herself be consumed as sexual symbol elicits male speech – thereby also making the speaker into author, and man. The economic side to this is the way in which men and women take on the form of commodities amongst themselves. It is in this sexual economy that they become men and women. The transformation of the sexed object into the systematic status of a sign, signifying its value, implies the simultaneous transformation of human relations into consumer relations: You consume or get consumed.

  Läs mer om Framkallning

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