UND welcomes Swedish crime fiction scholar to campus Oct. 26

Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures will host Swedish scholar Kerstin Bergman for a talk titled “Negotiating Swedishness in the 21st Century—Swedish, European, and African alterities in Henning Mankell’s crime novels.” Bergman’s presentation is at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct 26, in the East Asian Room at the Chester Fritz Library. The event is free and open to the public.

Bergman, a senior research fellow of comparative literature at Lund University, Sweden, was invited to UND by Melissa Gjellstad, assistant professor of Norwegian at UND. Bergman’s visit to UND is sponsored, in part, by the Nordic Initiative.

Henning Mankell, born in 1948, is a globally best-selling Swedish crime writer, occasional children’s author and dramatist, best known for a series of mystery novels starring his most iconic creation, inspector Kurt Wallander.

In many of his novels from the 2000s, Mankell discusses the issue of being a Swede today and of how Swedes perceive themselves and others in times of increasing Europeanization and globalization.

Bergman will examine how Mankell in three of his crime novels negotiates identities. In “The Return of the Dancing Master” (2000), he deals with how to incorporate the knowledge about Swedish Nazi collaboration during World War II into the collective memory of Sweden as a neutral country. In “Kennedy’s Brain” (2005), it is the impossibility to understand and overcome the distance to the African Other that is in focus. In “Den orolige Mannen” (2009) and “The Troubled Man” (out in English in February 2011), he discusses the negotiations of Swedish versus European identities in today’s Sweden.

Alterity is a philosophical term meaning “otherness.” Broadly speaking, it’s trying to understand someone else’s perspective or exchanging one’s own perspective for that of the “other.” The concept was established by Emmanuel Lévinas in a series of essays, collected under the title “Alterity and Transcendence.” The concept is used frequently in literary and cultural studies as well as other fields.

Kerstin Bergman is senior research fellow of Comparative Literature at the Centre for Languages and Literatures, Lund University, Sweden, where she earned her Ph.D. in 2003, and became an affiliate associate professor in 2009. Her current research is on the function of science in contemporary crime fiction (literature, film, and television) in a project financed by the Swedish Research Council. Bergman has published numerous articles on Swedish and international crime fiction and contemporary prose fiction.