The incessant distribution of moving images in the digital era not only draws attention to contemporary and future predicaments for reading and writing, but also makes it possible to recognize the ways in which literature historically has been contingent on optical media. This study examines how Swedish modernist literature in the 1930s responded to and was shaped by a situation in which moving images—following technological, discursive, institutional, and architectonic developments—had become a comprehensive aspect in people’s everyday lives. This film network brought about a biopolitics of the eye aimed at creating a homogenized observer within the population, who could serve both the emerging Swedish welfare state and an accelerating capitalist consumer culture. The study argues that the literature of the 1930s came to engage critically and productively with the network, while simultaneously incorporating—thematically as well as formally—its regulatory mechanisms.

Methodologically, the study is grounded in media archaeology. Literary texts serve as accounts of the medial conditions that make this literature possible in the first place, functioning as “a discourse on discourse.” Hence, while the literature is analyzed from the perspective of the network, these analyses conversely also shed light on the network and its mechanisms for subjectivation. The study consists of four chapters with in-depth analyses of literary works in relation to particular dynamics of the network, while also considering the changes, openings, closures, and unforeseen effects that continually appeared within it.

The first chapter shows how Karin Boye’s novel Astarte both reflects on and internalizes the changed conditions of perception that resulted from the breakthrough of electric light in the urban environment, with particular attention paid to its role in the movie palace. Conversely, the second chapter focuses on the part of the cinema building secluded from such perception control, namely the projection room, which serves as a precondition for the protagonist’s coming into being as a writer in Eyvind Johnson’s Künstlerroman Romanen om Olof. The third chapter connects Erik Asklund’s and Artur Lundkvist’s prose experiments in the early 1930s with the emergence of small-gauge film, which enabled a dispersed perception that was contrary to the strategy of the network. The fourth chapter, finally, shows how Boye’s novel Kallocain and Josef Kjellgren’s novel Människor kring en bro recapitulate the discourses and practices of educational film, which taught students, workers, and military personnel what was worth observing.

The sociological understanding of Swedish proletarian literature usually goes like this: in order to become a working class author the ‘proletarian’ writer paradoxically needs to abandon labor. While Eyvind Johnson’s four-part autobiographical Künstlerroman The Novel about Olof (1934–37) at first glance appears to follow that trajectory, this article shows how a particular line of work—namely, the work as a projectionist—in fact plays a fundamental role in the protagonist’s development towards writerly consciousness. 

The article takes as its point of departure the pivotal closing sequence of the third part, in which Olof, employed as a projectionist, starts to read an edition of the Odyssey during the screening of a film. Through a media-archaeological analysis of that scene, the article argues that Olof is reading in the projection room because historically it has functioned precisely as a space for reading. Not only was the projection room secluded and out of reach from the mechanisms of perception control in the auditorium; it also granted a livelihood without claiming all of the worker’s attention. In the words of Michel Foucault, the projection room can thus be regarded as a heterotopia—i.e. a space that simultaneously stands in relation to, and inverts, the power dynamics of all other spaces—both with regard to the cinema building and to capitalist society at large. 

The article shows how Olof ’s willingness and ability to read is indeed connected to his access to this heterotopian space for reading. Moreover, it argues that Olof is reading the Odyssey specifically because the Homeric epic is analogous to the tasks of the projectionist. The repetitive labor of the projectionist makes them a Penelope figure: the former is repeatedly winding and rewinding, while the latter is continually weaving and unweaving.

Få romaner i svensk modernistisk litteratur skildrar den urbana moderniteten med sådan medvetenhet om samtida idéströmningar som Karin Boyes Astarte (1931). Men om Boyes roman handlar om moderniteten så är den också teknologiskt villkorliggjord av densamma. Artikelns syfte är att blottlägga dessa mediehistoriska villkor genom en undersökning av romanen utifrån den ljus- och uppmärksamhetsregim – en syntes av begrepp av Jonathan Crary och Gilles Deleuze – som framträdde omkring 1930 till följd av det elektriska ljusets genombrott i urbaniteten och en arkitektonisk strukturomvandling av biografen. Skyltfönsterbelysning, ljusreklamer, neonskyltar och de nya biografpalatsens avancerade ljusspel bidrog vid den här tiden till en ökad styrning av människors perception och rörelsemönster, och artikeln visar hur denna regim strukturerar den kritik av konsumtionssamhället och masskulturen som gestaltas i romanen.

Few novels in Swedish modernist literature depicting urban modernity equal Karin Boye’s Astarte (1931) in theoretical awareness. However, while modernity may be the subject of the novel, Astarte itself is also conditioned by the technologies of its time period. The objective of this article is to uncover these media-historical conditions. It does so by examining the novel from the perspective of the regime of light and attentiveness – a concept derived from the writings of Jonathan Crary and Gilles Deleuze – which emerged around 1930 due to the establishment of the movie palace and the breakthrough of electric light in the urban environment. Shop window lighting, neon signs, and the sophisticated light projections of the movie palace all contributed to an increased control over human perception and movement, and the article shows how this regime organizes the critique of consumer society and mass culture depicted in the novel.