Anna Tomi: “Text of Kin – Utopian Intertextuality between Finland and Sweden in Interwar Literature”

Research presentation by Anna Tomi, University of California, Berkeley.

Abstract

Anna Tomi presents a chapter from her dissertation “Text of Kin – Utopian Intertextuality Between Finland and Sweden in Interwar Literature”, entitled “Occult Communities: Selma Lagerlöf, Aino Kallas, and the Poetics of Sacrifice”.  The presentation examines the Finnish modernist Aino Kallas’s intertextual dialogue with Selma Lagerlöf, in particular through her novella Sudenmorsian (The Wolf’s Bride) (1928), which responds to Lagerlöf’s Herr Arnes penningar (1904). As I will show, both writers in their own ways thematize the production of possibilities for gendered subjects through melodramatic moments of self-sacrifice. Kallas envisions the intertextual connection between the two texts as a utopian space of community, where female agency and queer intimacy is fostered, camouflaged from the patriarchal discourse responsible for gendered violence.