Finally finished the articles concerning Mats Malm and Anders Olsson. But first let me introduce both members of Swedish Academy, who are Permanent Secretary and Chairman of the Nobel Committee.
Mats Malm's essays tends to look at Swedish Baroque poetry and investigation into views on aesthetic pleasure as potential social threat and conception of sensuous language. His essays tends to ask questions like what happens to a text when the context it was written in disappears and how can a modern reader return to how it was meant and experienced at the time it was written. In one of his famous work of criticism Minerva's Apple, he presented what he believed to be the literary philosophy: the philosophy of mimesis as discussed by Aristotle and Averros among others (more on that latter). He was elected as Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy in 2019, replacing Sara Danius.
Essays of Anders Olsson, on the other hand, tends to reflect on intertextual connections with Gunnar Ekelof, a notable Swedish Poets and former member of Swedish Academy, fundamental questions in development of modern literature such as death of God and poetical nihilism, art of writing in fragments, modern exile literature and role of time, space and memory playing in this context, with references to Proust. He was working in the newspaper Kris, where he met Academy member Horace Engdahl, and was one of the earliest critics to introduced post-structualism and deconstruction into Swedish literary circles. He, along with Engdahl, introduced writers like Herta Muller, Jelinek, Maurice Blanchot, during their time in the aforementioned newspapers into Swedish literary criticism in the late 1980s. Anders Olsson became the Chairman of the Nobel Committee in 2019.
Since the Academy reshuffled in 2019, one could detect that both Malm and Olsson are both leaders of the Academy. Unlike in the past when Permanent Secretary seems to be the leader of the Academy, with his understanding of literature acting as the interpreatation of Nobel Testament, influence of Olsson and Malm in the choices of the Laureates can't be neglected. It seems both have deepest influence in the Academy and not the sole ideology of the Permanent Secretary as it was in the past.
Under this current era, I would say that the criteria is what I called Era of Mimesis. Let me list the features of this period, and of course citing examples:
-- Presentation of the self, individual making his experience universal, exploring personal and collective memory sometimes interpreted through social context
Annie Ernaux, Louise Gluck, Gurnah
--Represenation of art: the struggle to create works of art, in particular, correspondence to physical world understood as model for beauty and truth as discussed by Aristotle and Plato
Peter Handke (Afternoon of a Writer) Fosse (Septology), Gluck
-- Objects and nature as emphasizes and experience of reality: maps, photographs, body, road as adventures of experience, self-discovery and memory:
Tokarczuk (Flights), Handke (Repetition) Gurnah, Ernaux, Fosse (path's to divine and uncertainity's progressive relation to divine)
-- Role of Time, Space and Memory in one's existence
Handke (Repetition, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Moravian Night), Fosse, Ernaux
-- Drawing strength from oral storytelling and mythologies
Gurnah (absorbing generational narrative's traditional patterns by combing Arabian Nights and Conrad, Shakespeare and Chaucer) Gluck (classical myth)
--- Celebration of beauty of everyday life and nature
Handke (Don Juan), Fosse, Gluck
Summary of Mats Malm essays: Minerva's Apples, Souls of Poetry Redefined and Voices of Poetry:
Representation, which's chief principle of all arts.
Question of sublime and symbol, compression of space and excavation and archeology of mimesis as history of poetics situated within the broader picture of aesthetics and evolution of aesthetic concepts in relation to Averros.
Disappearance of a text's context and how modern reader returns to how it was meant and experienced at the time it was written and how nationality and literary presentation linked to one another at the time.
Aesthetic pleasure as potential sexual threat and conception of sensuous labague as unruly, contagious and lecherous.
Questions of composition of art through representation.
Voices of literature pursuing question on how the voices coming from literature written in a more orally based context can later be experienced differently and how literature changes its meaning through transmission.
Literature seen with harmless and beautiful nuance-- ironic or controversial.
Cultural policy: tradition of national patriotism of political nature-- theoroectical consist of shifts in conception of poetics and aesthetics-- imagery in relation between allegory and symbol.
Imitation: assimilation of himself to another either by use of voice or gesture: the writer in the narrative speaks for himself/herself (auto-fiction).
Rhetoric: adapting and reworking a source text by an earlier author and imitation of other authors and representing everyday life.
Art and language representing reality, perfection and imitation of nature with its changes, decay and cycles but art can search for what's everlasting and first causes of natural phenomena. Mimesis shows rather than tells by means of directly representing and enacting action.
With these analyses, it's very obvious that, and I must reiterate my hearty congratulations, to all members of the forum because we were, again when the Nobel Library was still accessible (2019--2022), we were 80 percent correct concerning the shortlist. In my next post I'll let you guys know how brilliant we were.