Ulf Olsson

    Ulf Olsson

  • Visiting Professor
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  • Office: 6406 Dwinelle Hall
  • Office hours: Spring 2020: Tu,W 3:30-4:30

Ulf Olsson is professor of comparative literature at Stockholm University, Sweden, but has frequently been coming to UC Berkeley, both to teach and to perform research. Olsson has published extensively on Swedish writer August Strindberg, as well as on more contemporary writers Birgitta Trotzig and Lars Norén. His latest book, Silence and Subject in Modern Literature: Spoken Violence (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) starts with Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, passes via writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Musil and several others, up to Peter Handke’s Kaspar, in a discussion of language as a medium for violent forming of the subject. Olsson is also interested in improvised music, and has published on artists such as John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and he is currently working on a book on the Grateful Dead, alongside a book on the late works of August Strindberg. Olsson’s theoretical focus is on the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin), and on Michel Foucault, and he also co-edited a selection of Foucault’s essays in Swedish translation. He is also interested in problems of violence, improvisation, commodification, exile, in literature.