Exploring Visual Modernity in Image, Text and Theatre: The Case of August Strindberg

Högre seminarium

The presentation will focus on a recently completed interdisciplinary book-project, August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text and Theatre, co-edited by Jonathan Schroeder, Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Eszter Szalczer.

It would be also great if participants could read "Samvetskval" by Strindberg, it's in volume 19 of Nationalupplagan, Strindbergs Samlade Verk, and available online at https://litteraturbanken.se/forfattare/StrindbergA/titlar/UtopierIVerkligheten/sida/141/etext We´ll discuss how the research for the book, the collaboration of its editors and contributing authors, and its methodology and scope evolved over the course of five years, from its conception at a centennial Strindberg conference at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2012 until the submission of the finalized manuscript to the publisher. To demonstrate the book¿s approach and methodology, the second part of the presentation will turn to my contribution, chapter 4, entitled "Strindberg the Environmentalist? Bloodstained Landscapes and the French Tradition of Nature Painting." Whether working in literary or visual media, Strindberg¿s engagement with nature was ubiquitous and lifelong. This chapter looks at how his conception of nature reflects shifting perceptions of modernity, embodied in landscapes of trauma, violence and expropriation. The novella Samvetskval (1884) serves as a key example of ways in which Strindberg worked out innovative conceptions of landscape and employed nature tropes across geographical, national and medial boundaries. One aspect of such boundary-crossing in Samvetskval is the way in which the text engages with the French tradition of nature painting, and thus constructs, as it were, a specular discourse between painting and literature. Another aspect we´ll explore is how Strindberg´s novella questions humanity´s relationship to nature, anticipating the environmental catastrophe of the post-industrial world. (publication by Bloomsbury Academic Press is scheduled for September 2018, https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/august-strindberg-and-visual-culture-9781501338007/)