Axel Englund – författare

The first book to use subversive sexuality as a lens through which to provocatively view opera in the 21st century.Imagine Armida, Handel’s Saracen sorceress, performing her breakneck coloraturas in a black figure-hugging rubber dress, beating her insubordinate furies into submission with a cane, suspending a captive Rinaldo in chains from the ceiling of her dungeon. Mozart’s peasant girl Zerlina, meanwhile, is tying up and blindfolding her fiancé to seduce him out of his jealousy of Don Giovanni. And how about Wagner’s wizard, Klingsor, ensnaring his choir of flower maidens in elaborate Japanese rope bondage?  Opera, it would appear, has developed a taste for sadomasochism. For decades now, radical stage directors have repeatedly dressed canonical operas—from Handel and Mozart to Wagner and Puccini, and beyond—in whips, chains, leather, and other regalia of SM and fetishism. Deviant Opera seeks to understand this phenomenon, approaching the contemporary visual code of perversion as a lens through which opera focuses and scrutinizes its own configurations of sex, gender, power, and violence. The emerging image is that of an art form that habitually plays with an eroticization of cruelty and humiliation, inviting its devotees to take sensual pleasure in the suffering of others. Ultimately, Deviant Opera argues that this species of opera fantasizes about breaking the boundaries of its own role-playing, and pushing its erotic power exchanges from the enacted to the actual.

What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

Languages of Exile examines the relationship between geographic and linguistic border crossings in twentieth-century literature. Like no period before it, the last century was marked by the experience of expatriation, forcing exiled writers to confront the fact of linguistic difference. Literary writing can be read as the site where that confrontation is played out aesthetically – at the intersection between native and acquired language, between indigenous and alien, between self and other – in a complex multilingual dynamic specific to exile and migration.The essays collected here explore this dynamic from a comparative perspective, addressing the paragons of modernism as well as less frequently studied authors, from Joseph Conrad and Peter Weiss to Agota Kristof and Malika Mokeddem. The essays are international in their approach; they deal with the junctions and gaps between English, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and other languages. The literary works and practices addressed include modernist poetry and prose, philosophical criticism and autobiography, DADA performance, sound art and experimental music theatre. This volume reveals both the wide range of creative strategies developed in response to the interstitial situation of exile and the crucial role of exile for a renewed understanding of twentieth-century literature.

Möjligheten att nå fram till något autentiskt har blivit föremål för en kritisk dekonstruktion; längtan efter det genuina och ursprungliga uppfattas alltmer som ideologiskt tveksamt; genomkommersialiseringen av samhället urholkar idén om äkthet när den förvandlas till en reklamslogan - ändå dyker tanken på det äkta, genuina och autentiska upp överallt i vår mediemättade verklighet. Att säga om någonting att det är äkta, genuint eller autentiskt innebär för de allra flesta en positiv värdering. Detta gäller inte minst på estetikens område: konstverk och kulturyttringar som tillskrivs dessa egenskaper står på ett eller annat sätt högt i kurs. Sådana omdömen signalerar att det som diskuteras inte är falskt, förvanskat eller manipulativt - kort sagt, att det är konst som inte är konstgjord eller konstlad. Men vad, mer exakt, kan autenticitet betyda i estetiska sammanhang? Är det möjligt att uppnå någonting alltigenom genuint, och vad skulle detta i så fall innebära? Texterna i denna bok, vars författare kommer från en mängd olika estetiska discipliner, spänner över hela den västerländska kulturhistorien: från antiken och renässansen via romantiken till modernismen och samtiden. De estetiska objekt och praktiker som diskuteras inkluderar inte bara litteratur, bildkonst och musik, utan även foto, modekollektioner, plastikkirurgi, rättegångar, fiktiva bloggar och konserverade djurkroppar. Tillsammans ger de tretton bidragen en rik och mångfacetterad bild av vad autenticitet kan vara - och om det kan vara - i en estetisk kontext. Redaktörer: Axel Englund & Anna Jörngården Författare: Franziska Bork Petersen, Magnus Bremmer, Carl-Filip Brück, Axel Englund, Maria Forsberg, Julia Habetzeder, Hannah Hinz, Anna-Maria Hällgren, Anna Jörngården, Erik Mattsson, Ljubica Miocevic, Mikael Pettersson, Emma Strindmar Norström