Skriveri

This is going to be an extremely long and probably excruciatingly boring post about my academic writing, so for those who have no interest in such things I am posting a picture of our yard taken from our patio door. It is lovely out right now, with cherry trees in bloom. It had just stopped raining when I took the snapshot:

You can see why I love it here, and why the spring makes slogging through such long dark winters worthwhile. And now onto the (pseudo-) erudition:

A couple of weeks back I listed the work projects I have hanging over me, and now I thought it would be a good time to update and revise the list. A couple of new things have come up, so I need to sort it out. Here's the edited list:

• revise Erlend Loe article [YES! revisions complete, article resubmitted to Norsk litterær årbok, and now waiting for proofs]
  
• revise conference paper on Ibsen's Når vi døde vågner (When We Dead Awaken) and expand into a journal article [YES! revision complete, paper delivered, expansion underway; got one really good suggestion for a reference at the conference]
  
• review two different books on Ibsen [NO! still languishing... all of us who have outstanding reviews were severely reprimanded at the conference; ah, the guilt]
  
• write something (anything!) that will count as a beginning on the cabin book so that I'm not a total fraud for having this stipend [YES! somehow I managed to start thinking about the first chapter, which will be about 7 Maurits C. Hansen short stories that were collected under the title "Skizzerede Nationale Fortællinger"; I'm very excited about my theoretical approach and about the idea of reading them all together as one unit, rather than only focusing on the one story that tends to get anthologized. It was even fun working with texts in Gothic Script, which I otherwise never do. For some reason, the stories-which are all romances-are viewed by most scholars as not nationalistic, despite the fact that cultural theorists have identified the family romance as a key metaphor in "foundational" national narratives for quite some time now.]
  
• write 2 or 3 articles on early modern texts so that I can claim expertise in that area (if a permanent job opens up here that will in all likelihood be one of the areas they're looking to cover - in that sense it was very fortuitous that I was able to teach the early modern course this term!) [NO! nothing happening on this front; too many other things going on]
  

So, that's pretty good I guess. Unfortunately, I just realized that I have a very important deadline coming up way too soon. I am going to give a paper on "intermedial" strategies in Erlend Loe's novel Volvo Lastvagnar at the NorLit 2009 conference ("Codex and Code: Aesthetics, Language and Politics in an Age of Digital Media") in Stockholm in August. I hadn't realized that I need to submit the complete paper (not just an abstract) by 6 June! I have a bunch written, but it's in Norwegian and I have been asked to present in English. I started re-reading and marking the novel while on my trip, and I have a ton of new ideas. I actually think this paper is going to be a fairly easy one to crank out. The only hitch is that my mother is going to be visiting between now and that due date and I want to spend as much time with her as possible while she's here.

I have a cool idea for what to do with my 5-10 minutes of presentation time at the actual conference (everyone who attends the session is expected to have read all the papers in advance, then each gives a brief intro before extended discussion of her or his paper). I can't give it away here, but suffice it to say that my plan is very "intermedial" and involves Rage Against the Machine.

The other new project that just appeared is an invitation to contribute to a new and very innovative history of Nordic literature. The second volume of the history will focus on topography, which is of course right up my alley. Here's the description I got via email:

Within the topographical volume we have chosen to organize our discussion of place into scapes and practices. The scapes deal with various places and kinds of places, the practices with different uses of place.

The scape section is divided into four main sections: landscapes, waterscapes, lightscapes, and cityscapes plus two additional sections: wordscapes and cyberscapes. The practice section consists of sixteen articles grouped into four interrelated rubrics that describe human interaction with place: traversing, dwelling, conquering and sacralizing. In the scape section, each writer is asked to write an essay that deals with a specific place, or a specific kind of place, with the aim of creating a cluster of different perspectives on a particular scape. In the practice section, each writer is asked to explore the ways in which a particular activity is depicted within Nordic literature, broadly conceived to include various sorts of writings over the course of centuries.

I'm delighted to have been asked to write one of the "practice" essays, but worry about finding the time to do something so broad at the same time as everything else I have going on. It seems like a huge job to consolidate such a broad historical and geographic span into an essay of under twenty pages. We're talking 13th century sagas to 21st century texts and Iceland to Finland. Ack! At the same time I really should be involved in the project. I'm giving myself a couple of days to think it over.