UC Berkeley

Modernism is often conceived as a radical break from tradition and a turn towards the interior.These critical orthodoxies draw on myriad images of outsiderness and non-belonging deployed by modernist authors across genres and traditions in interwar Europe. Yet these anti-social tropes are circulated intertextually, rendering them markedly social. My dissertation, entitled Text of Kin— Utopian Intertextuality Between Finland and Sweden in Interwar Literature, asks how we can account for these bonds between texts that otherwise advertise their own isolation. Approaching the question from the perspective of the often neglected yet pioneering moment of Scandinavian modernism, I trace the intertextual constellations that emerge between Finland’s and Sweden’s literary traditions, reflecting the former’s negotiation of its national identity in relation to its former ruler, as well as the broader modernist investment in the question of (anti- )tradition. My project establishes that the intertextually invoked space of poetry itself becomes the site of identification for modernist poets.

My dissertation makes three interrelated methodological contributions that resonate beyondthe particular cultural constellation of Scandinavian modernism. First, I demonstrate how an intertextual model of utopian empathy emerges through these conversations, challenging the notion of modernism as inward facing and radically breaking with the past. Second, I propose a correction of dominant models of influence and intertextuality, which understand textual agency as residing either in the individual author or decentered in an abstract textuality. My case studies demonstrate how referentiality between texts becomes an alternative site of belonging and sociality—in contrast to the rejected nation as a home—thus privileging a collective definition of intertextuality. And third, my readings bring into relief modernism’s symptomatic appropriation of marginality, from the perspective of a literary tradition itself in the cultural periphery. By tracing the intersecting lines of marginality in minor European poets identifying with Jewishness, exile, and diaspora, my dissertation proposes a decentering of the terminology of minor and major, while calling for a distance from modernism’s problematic tendency to exploit racialized marginality as a trope.

The first chapter, “Exiles in the Borderland: Gunnar Ekelöf’s and Hagar Olsson’s KarelianPilgrimages” examines the intertextual model emerging in the pilgrimage narratives of the Finland-Swedish author Hagar Olsson and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. Conceived of as Södergran’s, and Finnish culture’s, mythical original home, the Karelian borderland is viewed by both writers as a utopian anti-nationalist site. In the chapter, I demonstrate how what I call “textual pilgrimage” to the site encapsulates for both authors a theory of reading by dramatizing a modernist mode of (inter)textual attention. As such, it makes two arguments, by facilitating an aesthetic and spiritual reorientation and at the same time—in a contradictory way—negotiating the production of national identities and literary canons. Furthermore, both Olsson and Ekelöf set forth a formal ideal of a cryptic text that requires exegesis, and advocate the notion of an interpreter’s special, even sacred, authority. Pilgrimage represents for both writers the fantasy of overcoming, through textual empathy, the fundamental outsiderness represented by the borderland, conceived by both authors as exile. The centrifugal journey turns out to have been homebound all along, as both writers ultimately thematize the failure of a return to a pre-modern unity that might be found elsewhere.

The second chapter “Moving Boundaries: The Jewish Cemetery in Prague in SwedishPoetry” picks up the trope of the cemetery that has been introduced in the previous chapter, continuing to build on the notion of (inter)textual empathy. The chapter traces the topos of the Jewish cemetery in Prague over the course of a hundred years of Swedish poetry, as it travels from Carl Snoilsky to Ernst Josephson, Oscar Levertin, Arvid Mörne, Sten Selander, and finally to Birgitta Trotzig and Tomas Tranströmer. Rooted in the Romantic cult of sensibility, the intertextually fabricated site brings to relief an implied intertextual theory which views poetry as a virtual space for compassionate encounters with otherness. The site, a simultaneous emblem of mobility and fixity, is appreciated for its ability not only to move across contexts but to move us. From the post-1850 influx of Ashkenazi migration from Russia and Poland to post-1968 antinationalism, the trope is allegorized and universalized along the way, constituting a proxy for discourses on race, nationality, and belonging in Sweden and Swedish-speaking Finland. By following the image through the decades, we find that the Jewish cemetery in Prague is evocative to these poets precisely as it articulates unreadability, illustrating how poetry thematizes its own shortcomings, while simultaneously exemplifying the racialized juxtaposition of homecoming and exile in the project of nation building.

The third chapter, entitled “Occult Communities: Selma Lagerlöf, Aino Kallas, and thePoetics of Self-Sacrifice,” focuses on the intertextual dialogue between Aino Kallas and Selma Lagerlöf. Both writers thematize the production of possibilities for gendered subjects through the figure of the wolf and a melodramatic destruction of the protagonist, proposing a feminist politics of surrender and unreadability, in response to the patriarchal control over women’s bodies. The chapter furthermore suggests that Kallas develops Lagerlöf’s idea of futurity into a view of intertextuality itself as a utopian space of community, where female agency and queer intimacy is fostered. Despite the bond, Kallas’ novella also seeks to correct Lagerlöf where she deems her solutions to fall short, by revising the fractured female subject and subscribing to political solutions that privilege the individual of the present over the community of the future.

The fourth and final chapter, “Negating Children: Anti-Tradition in the 1920s Finland-Swedish Literature,” puts three Finland-Swedish writers into conversation: the modernist poets Gunnar Björling and Edith Södergran as well as the “last” writer of the previous period, Runar Schildt. Against the broader horizon of modernist literature’s typical disavowal of belonging in tradition—its characteristic anti-traditional rhetorical arsenal—the chapter examines how in all their works, the tension between infertility and fertility (or child/lessness) becomes a vehicle for the negotiation of belonging, both in the literary tradition and in the nation. As the site of the reproduction of the nation, the figure of the child encompasses anxieties regarding literature’s usefulness to the state, coming to function as a disruptive operator in the discourses of all writers. Yet, while all three share the gesture of rejecting tradition and futurity, thus calling into question the notion of modernist break, we also witness a characteristically modernist mode of intertextuality emerging in the works of Södergran and Björling, one that envisions a production of possibilities through elective kinships, in contrast to Schildt’s aesthetic pessimism. For the two modernists, the proliferation and queering of potential family lines through imagery of boundless fertility as well as a playful identification with the position of a rebelling child offers a complex model of identification and disidentification through intertextuality.