Anders Olsson (literary scholar)

Not so Olsson

Anders Olsson (born June 19, 1949 in Huddinge ) is a Swedish professor of literary studies at Stockholm University , literary critic and writer . He became a member of the Swedish Academy on February 20, 2008 , succeeding the writer Lars Forssell in chair number 4.

Life

Olsson attended high school in Västerås and during this time lived in the neighborhood with the writer couple Lars and Madeleine Gustafsson , who inspired him literarily. He spent a year in high school in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, and after graduating from high school in 1968, began studying Nordic languages, literary history with poetics and theoretical philosophy at Uppsala University . After a six-month stay abroad in 1972 in Berlin , he studied philosophy and literature at Stockholm University. There he met Horace Engdahl and Arne Melberg and published the anthology Hermeneutics with them in 1977 . In the same year, Olsson began, together with this circle of literary scholars and critics as well as other authors and artists, to publish the magazine Kris , which was important for the renewal of the Swedish literary perspective in the 1980s. During this time he also began to write literary reviews and his own poems. Under Kjell Espmark's guidance, he researched Gunnar Ekelöf's poetry .

Olsson came into contact with Zen meditation and spent a month in Paris with the Japanese Zen master Taisen Deshimaru . Zen continually plays a large role in his life and work. In 1979 he attended the Summer Program School of Theory and Criticism in Irvine , California, and had teachers including René Girard and Michael Riffaterre . Above all, the controversial cultural critic Girard made a lasting impression on Olsson, which was most recently reflected in the Syndabocken anthology published in 2007 .

Olsson made his debut in 1981 with the collection of essays Mälden mellan stenarna , with the title after a Gunnar Ekelöf series. The literary treatises of international standing were followed two years later by the dissertation Ekelöfs nej , in which the newly introduced "Thematic Critique" (the art of identifying key topics in the entire writing activity) was combined with close proximity to the text and intertextuality . This unique treatise led to a new perspective on Gunnar Ekelöf's cross-border work.

Shortly thereafter, Olsson made his debut as a poet. Dagar, aska (1984) reveals a melancholy world of images, meditative Zen inspiration and a great intertextual awareness. With a sense of tightness in Sweden's academic world, he moved to Berlin and wrote more poetry. De antända polerna (1986) followed his debut, while the masterpiece Bellerofontes resa (1988) has other dimensions. Based on the Iliad epic about the battle between the hero Bellerophon and the fire-breathing monster Chimera, Olsson built a much more versatile suite of poetry than before. The same mood of melancholy prevails, but the text is broader and more diverse in its kind.

Between these two collections of poetry he wrote the theoretically very influential work Den okända texten (1987), which became his way back into the academic world, on the modernist and difficult-to-interpret poetry of Paul Celan . The translation volume Lila luft (1989) initiated Olsson's literary translation activity, often in collaboration with other authors. He later translated, for example, the romantic Novalis and the cultural critic Thomas Bernhard in collaboration with Daniel Birnbaum , with whom he also wrote Den andra födan (1992).

The 1990s began with the collection of poems Solstämma (1991). Two years later the next poetic masterpiece, Det vita ( The White ), appeared, a curiously "vertical" collection of poems in which the main part of the poems takes on an elongated form and each line consists of one or a few words. It seems as if the poems are shrinking in width and moving against “the white”. It was five years before Olsson turned back to poetry with his last collection of poems, Ett mått av lycka (1998). These are haiku poems with tight, exact Japanese meter (three lines with 5 - 7 - 5 sound units).

Olsson was now more concerned with the words of others than his own. He started a major research project on the Finnish-Swedish poet Gunnar Björling . This resulted in the essay Att skriva dagen - Gunnar Björling's poetiska värld (1995) and the editions of Björling's Skrifter I – V (1995). This was followed by a number of easily accessible presentations of works by poets close to Olsson, Ekelunds Hunger (1996), on Vilhelm Ekelund and Gunnar Ekelöf (1997). Then a book was published with individual studies on the works of authors such as Stéphane Mallarmé , Rainer Maria Rilke , Wallace Stevens , Edith Södergran and Birgitta Defensig . This book proved crucial to his appointment as professor of literature at Stockholm University at the turn of the millennium. In 2006 Skillnadens konst was published, in which Olsson not only places the poetic fragment in a larger historical context, but also presents its occurrence in modern literary works.

His current research project deals with works of poetic modernism by Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, among others .

Olsson is married to the artist Agnes Monus.

Awards

• John Landquist Prize 1997
• Schückska Prize 2007

Works

• Johan Krouthén 1858-1932 , 1958
• Mälden mellan stenarna , 1981 (collection of essays)
• Ekelöfs nej , 1983 (doctoral thesis)
• Intertextualitet , 1984
• Dagar, aska , 1984
• De antända polerna , 1986
• The okända texts , 1987
• Bellerofontes resa , 1988
• Solstämma , 1991
• Den Andra Födan , 1992 (with Daniel Birnbaum )
• Det vita , 1993
• Ekelund's hunger , 1995
• Att skriva dagen , 1995
• Gunnar Ekelöf , 1997
• Ett mått av Lycka , 1998
• Läsningar av intet , 2000
• Skillnadens const , 2006
• men så oändligt lätt att svara dig , 2010
• Ordens asylum , 2011

Web links

• Literature by and about Anders Olsson in the catalog of the German National Library
• Jan Arnald: Anders Olsson. Biography on the Svenska Academies homepage. Retrieved December 7, 2012 (Swedish). 

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jan Arnald: Anders Olsson