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  4. Mats Jansson

Mats Jansson

Professor Emeritus

Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion
Mail
mats.jansson@lir.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Mats Jansson

My research focuses on questions related to literary criticism, lyrical modernism, reception history, and intermediality. In my doctoral thesis Tradition och förnyelse (1991, Tradition and renewal) I analyze the Swedish critical and lyrical reception of T.S. Eliot in order to demonstrate his seminal importance for the development of Swedish lyrical modernism in the 1930s and 1940s. I have also translated a selection of Eliot’s criticism in Om kritik (2002, On criticism). In Kritisk tidsspegel (1998, Critical mirror of its time) I focus on the role and function of literary criticism relative to the general breakthrough of Swedish lyrical modernism in the 1940s. Various theoretical approaches to ‘literary criticism’ – literary field, literary institution, intertextuality – are combined with empirical research. My monograph Den siste barden (2005, The last bard) investigates the writings of the Swedish modernist, poet and painter Sven Alfons (1918–96) and his relationship to the literary tradition. The concepts of ‘persona’ and ‘dramatic monologue’ are shown to be central in Alfons’ aesthetics. In addition, his paintings are found to be concordant with his poetry in their recurrent use of pictorial and literary quotations. Focusing on the concept of ‘ekphrasis’ in Poetens blick (2014, The poet’s gaze), I investigate this mode of expression in Swedish poetry from the Romantic era and further through its forms in modernist and postmodernist poetry. I hereby address semiotic, hermeneutical and phenomenological questions inherent in ekphrastic poetry.