Call for Streams
submit your stream idea via email to: sass2023@scandinavianstudy.org
The theme of this SASS meeting is everyday life, in the sense that the French theorist Michel de Certeau used the term in his 1980 study, L’invention du quotidien/The Practice of Everyday Life. In this work, which grew out of research originally funded as a study of consumer behavior, de Certeau argues that consumers, as well as people in precapitalist cultures, have the potential to react creatively to commodities, religious doctrines, and other cultural systems. Like canny shoppers at the supermarket, people may strive to combine what’s available to them to make the best possible meal. Colonized people sometimes appropriate aspects of the colonizers’ culture that subvert its oppressive potential. Workers in unrewarding jobs may surf the internet while appearing to conform to bureaucratic routines.
What to make of de Certeau’s emphasis on the positive role of creative bricolage or tinkering? What is its relationship to more explicit forms of resistance or more confrontational strategies to improve conditions for individuals or groups? Does de Certeau’s work allow for more room to maneuver than that of other theorists, such as Michel Foucault?
Michel de Certeau’s work offers a useful framework for exploring the roles of everyday life in literature, culture, and film, but stream proposals and papers need not engage explicitly with it. Other approaches are welcome.
Seminar streams might focus on some of the following topics:
– Nora’s macaroons: Ibsen and everyday life
– Man tager hvad man haver: Scandinavian cookbooks
– Foodie films and texts
– Appropriation and refashioning in Old Norse literature and culture
– The personal is the political: gender and everyday life
– Gossip
– Going too far: Scandinavian scandals
– Religion and everyday life in the North
– Everyday life in the Scandinavian novel
– Scandinavian literary studies and everyday life- Everyday life and civility
Stay up to date on the conference here: https://scandinavianstudy.org/annual-meeting/sass-2023-austin-2/