Kerstin Ekman's Visual Turns

Saturday I attended Cecilia Lindhé’s defense of her thesis Visuella vändningar. Bild och estetik i Kerstin Ekmans romankonst. (Visual Turns: Image and Asthetic in Kerstin Ekman’s Novels.) Anders Ohlsson from Lund University was the opponent, and interestingly enough Kerstin Ekman herself turned up for the proceedings, as this unbelievably blurry picture attests:

Lindhé’s interest is in what she terms the intermediality of the Swedish novelist’s work, specifically the connections to visual culture in books such as En stad av ljus and Gör mig levande igen. Both Bachtin and WJT Mitchell’s theories of metafiction and imagery, respectively, come into play in her analysis.

An interesting linguistic nuance is that Swedish lacks the distinction that English has between picture and image, with the former more concrete and the latter more abstract. In Swedish, bild serves both purposes, meaning Lindhé has to be careful to specify when she discusses visual imagery in Ekman.

There’s a video recording available online of Lindhé presenting at Umeå’s digital humanities center for those interested in her work on intermediality in Ekman.