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On the basis of the information panic about the Slave War of 1848 in Denmark and the professional ethics and discourse of modern journalism for the printed press of the late 19th century, the question of rumours, untruthfulness and related phenomena in media communication is investigated in a media history perspective. The information panic of 1848 exhibits common features as 'going viral' within digital media culture. Print news reporting, along with the ethics and discourse of 19th century journalism, served as a means of containing and regulating the flow of information, which is set free again, however, with the emergence of digital media culture. On the basis of this example, I argue in favour of downscaling the status of print media culture as the norm for judging contemporary media culture, including phenomena like 'fake news'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses skilling ballads as a news medium in the early modern period, and it suggests that in Scandinavia the news ballad was the most important journalistic genre for a broad public. Through a reading of ballads conveying news of fantastical creatures, the article considers how skilling ballads negotiated the borders between the true and the false, and how some of our contemporary mechanisms for revealing fake news can be detected in the early modern news ballads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an updated portrait of the controversial Russian writer and politician, Eduard Limonov (b. 1943), with a view to discussing him as at once an example of and a comment on contemporary conditions for art and politics in Russia under so-called developed Putinism. Based on Judith Butler's definition of identity as constituted by performative acts, the article analyses Limonov's varied activities throughout more than half a century as a coherent project insofar as he seems to be primarily concerned with creating the scandalous yet heroic identity of "Limonov", disregarding in the process any distinction between fact and fiction. First, as an underground artist in the Soviet Union and exiled, scandalous writer, then a rebel and founder of the now banned National Bolshevik Party in post-Soviet Russia, and, finally, an activist and politician in Putin's Russia, where he attempted to run for president in 2012. Previous attempts to pinpoint the ambiguous phenomenon of Limonov are discussed and used as a background for characterising his present predicament: the carefully created identity of "Limonov" seems to have been outmaneuvered by a political development very much in line with his own key policy issues, by a president successfully posing as exactly the kind of hero and saviour, "Limonov" was cast to be, and by a growing prevalence of and, consequently, indifference towards fake news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking off from El prodigio de Alemania [The Wonder in Germany, 1634], a recently discovered collaborative play by Calderón and Coello about general Albrecht von Wallenstein, this article discusses the conception of factuality informing Golden Age dramatic representations of contemporaneous history. Vis-à-vis the recurrent critical disparagement of this type of drama as artistically inferior propaganda, I will demonstrate the dramatists' delicate handling of the breaking news about Wallenstein's death and their use of advanced aesthetic and performative devices to stimulate audience thinking about Wallenstein's destiny: Why did he become a traitor? Highlighting the subtle doublespeak informing especially the epilogue and the protagonist's great monologue, I will argue that the play is at once loyal and critical toward Habsburg policy: it follows the official explanation of the general's murder -- that he was planning high treason -- yet at the same time demonstrates an essentially interrogatory conception of factuality that invites reflection on what is historical "truth". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the current efforts to rethink the perception of facts and fiction and the relation between the two arising in both academia and literature. Bruno Latour's repudiation of the modern division of subject and object implies that the hard facts of traditional science cannot be sharply dissociated from art and soft values. In tandem with Latour's increasing influence in a number of academic disciplines, a strong engagement with factual matters has appeared in literature. The field of science and the field of aesthetics thus seem to approach each other from both sides, science leaning towards artistic practices and fiction leaning towards facts. In his search for an alternative knowledge acquisition, Latour turns to aesthetic devices. Following this lead, the aesthetic attention of Pejk Malinovski and the recently actualized Frank O'Hara and Robert Walser appears to insist on meeting things openly, in their specific situations and concrete exchanges, inspiring Latour's call for a transformation of matters of fact into matters of concern. The question is, however, to what extent Latour's perspective is able to make real scientific use of this kind of production of meaning. Considering Martin Heidegger's and Hannah Arendt's views on the relation of technology, knowledge, value, and art, it seems that Latour after all might not be that disengaged from modern philosophy and the modern stress on separation rather than mediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the two cultures in the study of conspiracy culture, where social science disciplines provide one type of approach and cultural studies another. To make a claim for recovering the use of literature in the field, both to bridge the divide, if possible, and to suggest new critical directions for literary studies itself, the article offers a reading of two congruent conspiracy narrations, Donald Trump's rhetoric and Thomas Pynchon's novels. Both are examples of ambiguous narration, which may be taken at face value by one reader and invested with hidden significance by another, thus creating two closed-off epistemic bubbles - politically and critically. When critics have not been taking conspiracy fans, which could include esteemed literary figures like Pynchon, seriously, they have been guilty of closed reading. Fans themselves, though equally closed readers technically, offer avenues into affective and co-creative conspiracy readings which are, paradoxically, open to the reparative possibilities literature can have in a politically paranoid society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a critical commentary on the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-V, from 2013. It traces the historical reasons behind the fact that sexual preferences are included as mental disorders in the psychiatric manual, even if many of them are empirically neither generally associated with impairment or harmful to anyone else. This holds true for fetishism, masochism and consensual sadism among others, and the article pays special attention “sadism” and “masochism, which as “clinical” terms are constituted from the names of literary authors. Second it close reads the descriptions in DSM-V to show that there are several reasons why these descriptions become pathologizing and stigmatizing despite explicit intentions to be the opposite. These include erosions of the distinction between paraphilia and paraphilic disorder – a distinction on which the very possibility of diagnosis is established. Furthermore, the handbook does not make the non-consensual, the impairing or the harmful, the over-riding principle but instead the sexual preference in and of itself. The article shows how deeply affected the conceptions of the real-world preferences are by the events and characters in the fiction of these authors, and how hierarchical disparity and power exchange are typically more central to the preferences than pain with which they have been so closely linked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes Lars Saabye Christensen’s novel Maskeblomstfamilien (2003) with a particular focus on uncovering how the novel portrays and addresses the shame and stigma associated with deviating from established gender norms. Drawing on Judith Butler’s works Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, the article investigates the social regulation that the novel’s protagonist undergoes in 1960s Norway within the framework of the heterosexual matrix. While Butler’s theoretical texts do not provide extensive descriptions of how the regulation of the heterosexual matrix operates in practice and how it feels to be subjected to it, an analysis of Maskeblomstfamilien offers a more comprehensive understanding of how these regulations function in relation to the allocation of shame, acts of violence and hatred, institutional violence, and social exposure. Concurrently, the novel highlights the protagonist’s resistance to these regulations through strategies such as hyperbolic misquotation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Generally, the conception of intertextual references in literary theory has been either very broad or very narrow and detail-oriented. On the one hand, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva conceive of intertext as a universal feature of all texts. No text is original and made by itself isolated from those existing before it. All texts, in short, are intertexts because they refer to other texts, conventions, and presuppositions beyond authors' intentions. But this broad concept is difficult to work with in analyzing works of literature. It poses problems of identification and does not mark out a manageable area of investigation or object of attention with the undefined and infinite discursive space it designates and its idea about anonymous citations. On the other hand, we have the more restricted view that focuses on specific, readily recognized signs of intertextual relations between literary texts. Gérard Genette offers a vocabulary to describe the interaction between only two identifiable texts. In this article, I shall propose a third alternative that takes the middle ground and investigate what a rhetorical approach to intertextuality means for the understanding of the concept of comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]