Gustaf Marcus

Short presentation

I am a researcher in French and comparative literature at Uppsala University. From the spring of 2024, I am working on the research project “France (Un)Seen by the Writers”, which focuses on regionalism in contemporary French literature. I have also studied literature and advertising, and normalization in Swedish literature and societal debate around the turn of the 20th century.

From January 2025, I am serving as editor for Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap (https://publicera.kb.se/tfl).

Keywords

• globalization
• decadence
• michel houellebecq
• regionalism
• august strindberg
• regional literature
• contemporary french literature
• literature and advertising
• regional fiction

Biography

Researcher in literary studies at the Department of Literature and Rhetoric, Uppsala University, from 2024. Postdoctoral researcher in French and literary studies at Uppsala University (Department of Modern Languages) and the Sorbonne, between 2019 and 2023.

PhD from Linköping University in 2018 with the thesis Paria: Brottslingen och normaliseringen av människan i Strindbergs, Hanssons och Geijerstams författarskap (Carlssons bokförlag). The thesis was awarded a scholarship by the Swedish Academy from the Stina and Erik Lundberg Foundation.

Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne, 2011.

Research

My research focuses on contemporary French literature and Scandinavian literature around the turn of the 20th century. I am interested in how literature relates to broader cultural and social issues, such as spatiality, regionalism, advertising, and normality.

France (Un)Seen by the Writers

My ongoing research project, “France (Un)Seen by the Writers: Glocalization and Re-Regionalization in the Contemporary French Novel (2005–2025)”, explores the representations of regionalism and of peripheral, often rural, places in contemporary French literature. Novelists such as Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Houellebecq, and Jean Rolin, along with several authors of popular fiction, regularly return to the historic regions of the country. These “re-regionalization novels” are also part of a surge of regionalism in the West, which includes such disparate trends as rural gentrification, urban-rural polarization (as demonstrated by the Yellow Vests protests), and increasing regional governance.

Why is this happening now? And how does the contemporary novel portray regional identities in a globalized world? Unlike the common interpretations of modernity as a force that creates global identities, the hypothesis is that smaller geographical units acquire new meanings and often become more important as the nation-state weakens in the face of global challenges.

The aim is, first, to study new literary forms that explore the framings, visualizations, and exclusions that shape experiences of spatial belonging today; and, second, to develop a new theoretical vocabulary for analyzing questions of regionalism and regional fiction.

The project is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (https://www.rj.se/en/grants/2023/france-unseen-by-the-writers-glocalization-and-re-regionalization-in-the-contemporary-french-novel-20052025/).

Previous Research Projects

Another research interest is the connections between literature and modern advertising. I have studied how several authors, such as August Strindberg, Knut Hamsun, Rachilde, and the French surrealists, took inspiration from advertisements in their literary work, and sometimes even worked directly with different types of advertising. The breakthrough of modern advertising in the late nineteenth century inspired new aesthetic practices that were often regarded as intricately connected to modern urban life itself. At the same time, this confrontation with modern advertising inspired discussions about authenticity, value, and the relationship between private personality and public persona. The work on literature and advertising was in part carried out during a stay as visiting scholar at Études nordiques, Sorbonne University (2019), and as a part of the interdisciplinary research project Littépub (http://littepub.net/).

A third research interest is the history of normality as it is reflected in literature and visual culture. In my dissertation, Paria: Brottslingen och normaliseringen av människan i Strindbergs, Hanssons och Geijerstams författarskap, I studied how Swedish authors at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries approached questions of normality and abnormality. The starting point for the study was the growing popularity of crime fiction in the late nineteenth century. During this period, the criminal came to be perceived as an abnormal individual who needed rehabilitation rather than punishment to achieve normality. This gradual shift from morality to normality was part of an emerging technology of power analyzed by Michel Foucault in his seminal work on biopower and governmentality.

In the dissertation, I examine how the authors were inspired by the ideology of normalization as it was presented in the scientific discourses of the time, in disciplines such as criminal anthropology and psychiatry. I also show how the literary authors used the new images and “iconography” of deviance that relied on new visual techniques, such as composite photographs, stereoscope images of criminals, and biometrical images. On a more fundamental level, the literary texts express the ambiguities of normalization itself, which is both a form of repression and a way to preserve or free the individual. In the examined works, this ambiguity is played out; the authors give voice to a negative or repressive exclusion of deviance, but the goal of this normalization is simultaneously to shape a new subjectivity that, in turn, becomes a point of departure for a critique of normalization itself.

The dissertation was awarded a prize by the Swedish Academy from the Stina and Erik Lundberg Foundation in 2019.

Media

Interviewed on Swedish Public radio: Vetenskapsradion Historia, P1, ‘Sanningen om brottslingen,’ March 6, 2018. https://www.sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1031599

The dissertation Paria reviewed by Arne Melberg in Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), ‘Under Strecket,’ ‘Strindbergs intresse för brott och normalitet,’ February 19, 2018. https://www.svd.se/a/3jBm8e/strindbergs-intresse-for-brott-och-normalitet