The journal SPRING no. 50
Freedom and crisis
We are today, as has been highlighted in many contexts, embedded in a larger body of disasters than perhaps ever before. The crises are lined up, corona crisis, climate crisis, biodiversity crisis, refugee crisis, financial crisis, war in Europe... In this issue of Spring, we turn the spotlight on the concept of crisis, but in a more extended sense, as it should not only be about some of the mentioned crises, but also about crises on various other existential and mental psychological levels. Closely connected to the concept of crisis is the question of freedom. The question is to what extent and whether we even have a free choice in relation to navigating and finding possible ways out of the crises, not least in relation to the overall geopolitical world order. The degree of freedom comes into play when it comes to the choices we as people want to make in relation to (major) political crises, but also the more personal existential choices when it comes to gender, sexuality, religion, motherhood, education, work etc. The overriding social focus on economic freedom, however, seems to have sidetracked the other values of freedom and put human dignity at risk. What happens when our freedom is curtailed? And what is it that sets the limits of our freedom? And how does it play into contemporary literature?
These are just a few of the long series of puzzling questions that can be asked when it comes to complicated dimensions such as freedom and crisis, and which are attempted to be answered and nuanced in the articles for this issue of Spring.
CONTENTS
Preface
Erik Svendsen
Freedom – the best gold?
Torsten Bøgh Thomsen
We need Arcadia when the reality is Rome.
The relevance of pastoral care in times of climate crisis.
Duncan Wiese's Tityrus
Johanne Gormsen Schmidt
On the inside of the freedom struggle.
About Rasmus Nikolajsen's Maybe the soul
Anita Maskova
From subdued antagonist to boundary-breaking hero.
About the transformations of the figure of pregnancy in feminist thinking - and the mother's body as a political domain and artistic material with Kirsten Justesen
Camilla Schwartz
How to make a quilt.
Selection and non-selection of motherhood in contemporary literature
Peter Stein Larsen
Radical freedom and rebellion in Klaus Høecks
Black Sonnets and Lone Aburas' The Black Book
Christian Steentofte Andersen
"From 1 May to me first".
Copenhagen's gentrification and social crises in Lone Aburas' Føtexsøen
Jacob Bøggild
The remarkable institution called literature. Thoughts on artistic freedom,
is taken in a poem by Madame Nielsen
Lilian Munk Rösing
Intertextual crisis management.
About Harald Voetmann's Amduat. An oxygen machine and HC Andersen's Quarantine Diary
Erik Skyum-Nielsen
Anchoring and dreaming of change.
Three novels by Merete Pryds Helle