Guest lecture by Professor Thomas Mohnike, Université de Strasbourg.
When talking about Scandinavia outside or inside of Scandinavia, the same sets of – sometimes contradictory – elements are used and reused: nature, modernity, coldness, suicide, welfare state, liberty, masculinities and femininities, Vikings, peacemaking, Protestantism, paganism, secular societies and many others. However, the elements are not always combined in the same manner – and they change in history and space. In my talk, I want to sketch a new approach of describing the logic and dynamics of the reuses of these “Mythemes of Social Knowledge” of the North, inspired by a productive misunderstanding of structuralist ideas (C. Lévi-Strauss and others) and fused with insights from Literary Darwinism and the study of the geography of knowledge with a little help by digital humanities.