Böcker i Soedertoern Doctoral Dissertations-serien

Friendship between men is a key theme in most novels by Hermann Hesse, one of the most widely read German-language authors of the twentieth century and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Hesse’s protagonists are usually depicted as outsiders who come to know themselves in an intimate bond with another man. The friend is almost always portrayed as rebellious, beautiful, enigmatic, and inspiring, and comes to play a key role in the protagonist’s personal development and journey through life. Outsiders and Others draws on queer theories and queer concepts to explore how characters in Hesse’s fiction intersect with and connote queerness—such as homoeroticism and nonconformism—and argues that the friendships at the center of Hesse’s stories are queer friendships that challenge heteronormative conceptions of relationality, sexuality, and desire. With readings of the novels Peter Camenzind (1904) and Der Steppenwolf (1927), this dissertation demonstrates that queerness is an essential element in Hesse’s frequent depictions of friendship. Oscar von Seth (born 1981) is based at the Department for Comparative Literature at Södertörn University, Stockholm. His research interests include queer theory, masculinities, and representations of disability, animality, and race in literature. In addition to his academic work, he is the author of the novel Snö som föll i fjol (“Yesterday’s News,” Calidris, 2017).

The idea of the Viking is a figure with wide appeal and a large presence in popular culture. The Viking motif also has long-standing associations with normative masculinity, reactionary values, and even white supremacy. This study examines a common but understudied arena of the popular Viking: popular fantasy literature. More specifically, it looks at a recent subgenre called gritty fantasy. First developed in the 2000s, gritty fantasy is deeply invested in and revolves around contemporary concerns regarding masculinity, masculine failure, and narratives of masculinity in crisis. The study emerges from queer engagements with masculinity and the method of queer reading, asking how to understand the seemingly ubiquitous masculinity of the Viking and its popularity beyond an assumed direct relation to men or men’s concerns, and how this relates to ideas about the Nordics and the North.

As the population increases, urban environments across the globe are expanding and becoming denser. In conjunction with this, neoliberal capitalist policies impact how urban land is used, and who is given access to it. Changes in the urban landscape do not go uncontested, however. The rise of collective gardens is one example of action where people challenge dominant rationales of urban land use. These gardens emphasise collective management and publicly-oriented educational and cultural programming. They are also places where alternative norms of urban life are nurtured. What are these alternative norms, how are they nurtured, and what does this tell us about contemporary experiences of urban life in the context of neoliberal capitalism?

How can we understand Foucault’s work on ancient philosophy, and its practices of truth-telling and technologies of the self? While this late phase in Foucault’s thought has often been seen as marking an ethical turn, away from the explicit political stakes of his earlier works, this book articulates the continuities between his engagement with antiquity and political events in his own present.Beginning with a reinterpretation of the question of early and late style in Foucault’s oeuvre, this investigation provides careful readings of his lectures at the Collège de France, showing how the care of the self – the style of existence – unfolds as a critical project. With the notion of the subject developed in Foucault’s late work, the ancient practices of truth-telling can be articulated with modern economic government, introducing a radically new understanding of the concept of critique.Karl Katz Lydén is a writer and critic, editor of Found Review, Swedish translator of Foucault, and author of Poems and Parables on the Political Utility of Art (Bom Dia Books, 2021).

Here the potential of w/o/a/ndering, anarchism, and storytelling in Early Childhood Education is explored. Autoethnography is employed to blend personal experiences with theoretical insights, dissecting contemporary educational landscapes through philosophical traditions like anarchism and existentialism. Central to this exploration is the concept of w/o/a/ndering, symbolizing an interplay between wonder and wandering encouraging an open-ended quest for knowledge, imagination, belonging and meaning. Matteo Enrico Cattaneo is a pedagogista and a scholar in philosophy of education at Södertörn University, Stockholm. His research interests include philosophy, in particular critical theory, existenstialism and anarchism, creative writing, storytelling and philosophy for children and community of inquiry.