https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=658 L’imaginaire et la construction culturelle de l’espace sont au centre des intérêts de Deshima, avec une attention spécifique pour les « Nords » et les stéréotypes associés. Un pluriel délibéré, dans la conviction qu’il faut envisager des géographies et des imaginaires en évolution permanente. Explorer ces images permet de mieux les connaître et de comprendre qu’elles sont le reflet de lieux réels mais aussi de fantasmes individuels ou collectifs. Dans ce nouveau numéro aussi, donc, nous partons de l’espace concret pour arriver à l’espace construit, détruit et reconstruit. Au cœur de cette exploration se trouve le concept de « mythème ». Repris de l’ethnologie, il a été adapté par Th. Mohnike, dont nous accueillons une contribution théorique, à l’histoire culturelle et littéraire. Les contributions dans ce numéro sont étroitement liées à ces réflexions qu’elles appliquent à des sujets variés, scandinaves aussi bien que néerlandais. Des « Savants mélanges » et des avant-premières littéraires et artistiques complètent le numéro, en explorant des imaginaires non-spatiaux, mais néanmoins déterminants pour l’identité nationale des pays concernés. Numéros en texte intégral fr mer., 01 oct. 2025 10:44:37 +0200 jeu., 04 déc. 2025 09:52:09 +0100 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=658 0 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=659 mer., 01 oct. 2025 10:51:42 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=659 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=662 mer., 01 oct. 2025 10:58:31 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=662 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=663 When studying the history of geographical imaginations of the North, scholars often note that in spite of the wealth of cultural, artistic and societal contexts that are analysed, the same sets of elements representing the North can be found in constantly evolving combinations. In order to understand the sign system that is the North in social knowledge, the present article argues that we should change perspective and start by observing the smallest parts of the system, describing their nature and their ability to connect with other units of discourse. I propose to call these smallest units of discourse ‘mythemes of social knowledge’, and the laws determining the possibilities to combine mythemes at a certain moment in time their ‘discursive grammar’. This approach allows us to understand the perceived stability not as a historical fact per se, but as an effect of family resemblance between mythemes changing through use and cultural circulation, and it permits to trace the history and geography of these transformations. In spite of the apparent simplicity of the approach, it proves to be quite complex as soon as we want to describe the changing repertoire of mythemes of the North in cultural circulation because of the number of sources and mythemes that should be considered. It requires data management that goes beyond traditional pen–and–paper analysis. It demands the use of relational databases, best informed by digital text retrieval with tools still to be developed. The last part of the article investigates the challenges and possible solutions for the sketched problem and presents first experimental results. It also shows that digital analysis not only allows us to handle the apparent complexity, but also helps to avoid the arbitrary definitions of individual mythemes because it forces us to work in a counterintuitive fashion, by objectivizing intuitive knowledge. mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:00:19 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=663 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=664 In the second half of the seventeenth century, successful bookseller and proliferous author Simon de Vries provided Dutch readers with a panoramic image of the Arctic regions by translating and expanding Isaac de la Peyerere’s description of Greenland under the title Nauwkeurige Beschrijvingh van Groenland (1678) as well as by publishing a compendium of travelogues under the title De Noordsche Weereld (1685). He was the first to do so, thereby reaching a broad audience of middle–class Dutch citizens. I will analyse De Vries’s pre–enlightenment projection of the northern world by taking a closer look at his translation strategy of expanding his sources by adding his own elucidations. From these additions it appears that De Vries propagated a traditional mythical image of the North, which increasingly was at odds with the observations and intentions of the authors he translated, but that still enjoyed an enduring popularity among the readers he targeted. mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:05:40 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=664 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=666 At the turn of the 19th century, the island of Rügen in Swedish Pomerania, which had long remained at the margins of the Holy Roman Empire, suddenly becomes an object of interest and a travel destination for the cultured elite. Between 1797 and 1805, four travelogues on Rügen were published, coinciding with Caspar David Friedrich’s first works including the island’s landscapes as a motive. These travelogues are at the centre of our article, which studies the key role these texts played in establishing the island of Rügen as a place set deeply the German imaginary. Drawing from the many contributions of local authors who worked throughout the 18th century to promote Rügen’s history, geography and landscapes, these travelogues made their content accessible to a wider public and drew attention to specific aspects of the island, following the tastes and interests of the time period: its baths, its picturesque landscapes, its ancient ruins, its sublime cliffs. In this context, tensions arose between the travelogues of the local elite, who wished to keep control of Rügen’s image, and the travelogues written from the perspective of outsiders whom the local elite itself had drawn here with their promotional work. Through these interactions between different perspectives, between texts and images, the island of Rügen gained a spot in the German mental geography—a spot that it has kept to this day. mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:06:48 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=666 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=668 The work of Adele Schopenhauer (1797–1849), the philosopher’s sister, is little known, but his artistic, critical and literary works deserve to be rediscovered. In 1848, she published Eine dänische Geschichte (A Danish Story), a story set in Lolland, which also presents exhaustive descriptions of the landscapes of extreme northern Denmark and Iceland. The author, however, was familiar with the Baltic Sea, having been born in Danzig. She might have never travelled to the areas she describes, but she had a profound knowledge of historical, literary and geological texts related to them. She has also undoubtedly been in contact with the Danish colony in Rome and, more particularly, the sculptor Jens Adolph Jerichau and the painter Thorald Lassoe, whom she had met in the Papal State’s capital between 1845 and 1847. The Nordic landscape that she imagines, and that she lets her readers imagine, forms the backdrop of the novel, while becoming the setting of the inexorable revolution of individuals at the end of the 18th century. mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:07:48 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=668 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=670 The sunken city of Vineta occupies a special place among the lost cities whose archaeological and imaginary traces punctuate the North Sea and the Baltic coasts. Its name refers both to a vague historical reality, a very important Slavic Baltic merchant port, probably founded between the 5th and 9th centuries and destroyed in the 11th century, and to the local basis of the European mytheme of the proud city sunk as a punishment for its sins, the model of which is ancient Atlantis. When it comes to locating Vineta, the main difficulty lies in the imprecision of the archival sources. The hypothesis of a single city in Wolin (in present–day Poland) eventually superseded the others when the excavations of the site in the 20th century uncovered an important port complex that had been in contact with Europe and Asia. However, minority hypotheses continue to be defended. In any case, Vineta appears to be one of the Slavic cities erased from the coastal geography—through outright destruction or a change of location or name—as part of a confrontation between pagans and Christians, as well as between Germans, Danes and Slavs. The abundance of catastrophic storm floods gives those coastal landscapes a constant natural reconfiguration: blurred, intermediate and moving places which, in the German geographical imagination, are opposed to the mountainous landscape of Middle Germany, well represented in romantic natural poetry. The legend of Vineta and its uncertain geography lent itself particularly well to diverse national resemantisations in modern times. The existence of an ancient Slavic metropolis of European relevance/dimensions could be seen as a proof of the greatness of these peoples, especially at a time (18th–19th centuries) when they were fighting for their autonomy or independence: this was the case with Johann Gottfried Herder, Pavel Jozef Šafárik, Juliusz Slowacki, Jaroslav Vrchlický or Feliks Nowowiejski. On the German side, nationalists have also tried to reclaim the Vineta legend to illustrate their cause, from Ludolf Wienbarg to the ‘ariosophical’ colony of “Neu-Vineta” in the 1940s. However, Romanticism also proceeded to detach the motif from its local background and elevate it to the status of a myth that evokes loss and remembrance of the past. From the 19th century onwards (Wilhelm Müller, Heinrich Heine), Vineta has abstracted itself from its geographical and national component and has come to signify, in a more universal and intimate way, either the return of the repressed (in the Freudian Wilhelm Stekel), the German Jewish world submerged in the flood of history (in Robert Schindel) or even the disappearance of the identity of the former GDR (in Uwe Kolbe). mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:08:33 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=670 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=672 In 1977, Raymond Murray Schafer developed the concept of “soundscape”, which was translated into French by “paysage sonore”. Even though Murray Schafer has not been the first to be interested in the sound environment, his conceptualisation has opened a whole field of research, soon adopted by acousticians, ethnologists, geographers, but also historians. Beyond the visual dimension attached to the geographical notion of landscape, Murray Schafer wonders why certain sound characteristics are attached to landscapes. Sounds are likely, as much as visual elements, to evoke a landscape, which the listener sometimes transcribes into images and words, thus feeding a whole regime of imagination based on his cultural background. The historian working on the times preceding the invention of sound recording depends on these transcriptions being made by the witnesses, which are also interpretations. This obliges him to consider them as clues to gain access to a certain cultural sensitivity on the receiving side as much as traces of the emitted sound itself. In this paper, we propose to study the references to the sounds of Lapland through a series of French travel stories published between 1840 and 1900. Based on sound categories defined by the researchers in this field, we will identify the various mentions related to the sounds picked up by travellers. We will then show how the selection of sounds and their memorization can be part of a cycle of the imaginary, in the sense that the philosopher Gilbert Simondon gives to this notion. Finally, we will show that beyond the categories previously mentioned sound is a vector of memories and reveries that indirectly mirror the condition of otherness in which the traveller, far from home, finds himself. mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:09:22 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=672 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=674 This article discusses the imagined geography of Northern Europe in the 1930 from the story of a commemorative plaque located in Tromsø, Norway. The plaque, which commemorates the disappearance of an airplane with a Franco-Norwegian crew in 1928, is the product of a desire to create specific touristic spatial practices: it is one of the places on the route of an annual cruise to the North Cape, organized by the Stella Polaris company and the newspaper Le Temps. It is installed on a location offered by the city of Tromsø and has been financed by Le Temps and the cruise company. The analysis of the memorial ceremonies organized around this plaque and the articles published in Le Temps to promote the cruise allows to highlight the willingness shared by all the partners involved to strengthen the representations of Tromsø as an arctic city. mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:10:09 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=674 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=676 Travelers to the island of Marken, in the Netherlands, have often considered the inhabitants of this village to be similar in appearance to Scandinavians. Hasty conclusions integrate the Netherlands into the “Germanic” world. At the same time, the traditional costumes of Marken tell a very different story. Textiles sewn onto these costumes have multiple origins, including Spanish, Indian or Indonesian for example. We discover a whole geography made of multiple textile pieces. This assemblage tends to prove that cultural transfers have been numerous on this island. mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:12:13 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=676 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=678 In this article, I seek to understand what the North, and more specifically Sweden, represents for the reader of the 1880s by highlighting various references to the Northern imaginary in a novel by Anne Charlotte Leffler, En sommarsaga (1886). My hypothesis is that Leffler, through folklore, does not intend to describe a real geographic territory, but rather an imaginary geography fabricated throughout the novel. Indeed, it is around the themes of nature, folklore and women’s emancipation that the North takes form through the heroine’s dreams of her homeland after spending many years in Italy. Using the outside look of the stranger, therefore, Leffler creates both a novel of feminine questioning and a poetic journey through which the author describes the mysterious landscapes of the Swedish summer and creates a new space, in which Utopias are not only allowed, but also put to the test of reality. Finally, the imagination of the North seems to be a means for the heroine to understand her own situation and her desire for emancipation. mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:12:55 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=678 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=679 The website of the Swedish publishing house Bonniers presents Tomas Tranströmer as “one of the most genuinely Swedish poets, masterful in his visions of interior and exterior coldness and barrenness”. An acclaimed master of the short poem, Tranströmer’s 1974 Östersjöar (Baltics, in the English translation) is his most ambitious attempt to write a long poem. It is also the only one of his books in which he names and thematises a precise geographical reality. This article offers a reading of Baltics that shows how the geographical space of the Baltic sea contributes to the construction of a deeply personal poetical territory of which it becomes an essential part. The form Tranströmer gives to his longest poem is intimately linked to the themes which it develops while making of Baltics a central book in the author’s poetical production as a whole. mer., 01 oct. 2025 12:05:46 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=679 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=680 The architect is not only the creator of space but also the one who designs the space. As a character, therefore, the architect is a rewarding object of research since it is through the description of space that characters are defined—explicitly or implicitly. In the novel Euforie (Euphoria, 2012) of Christiaan Weijts, the reader deals with architect Johannes Vermeer as the main character. As a consequence, the reflections made by Vermeer are a contribution to the meaning of the story: they not only reveal the character, but also contribute to the overall meaning of the novel. The architect as an actor and a character is responsible for the novel’s ideological and aesthetic (architectural) views and forms of the world around him. I analyse the ideological aspects associated with his architectural views by examining how they have taken shape in the text and how the protagonist will come to design a special place in the city (cité—a concept drawn from a comparison with Richard Sennett’s Building and Dwelling. Ethics for the City) after a terrorist attack. Vermeer is, in fact, also (and above all) criticising a very Dutch concept of maakbaarheid of society (a form of social engineering), which combines well with the idea of modernity as the “machines’ era” since it supposes human beings are programmable, just like machines. mer., 01 oct. 2025 12:13:51 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=680 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=682 Only a part of what we know and perceive depends on direct experiences, and we often have (or are forced) to integrate our knowledge with our deduction, imagination or hearsay, sometimes drawing inspiration from widespread prejudices. Erlend Loe’s protagonist has been commissioned a brochure on Finland for Norwegian tourists and wants to fulfil this task, even though he has never been there and he knows very little about the country. By collecting all the features he has heard of or read about (we could say all the mythemes) on Finland, he realizes that he already has of a great deal of ideas he can work on. Moreover, the accomplishment of this mission is constantly entwined with his psychological development and his facing of his inner troubles, from his fear of water—which always implies change—to his relationship with people and even natural space, in the town of Oslo, where the novel is set. In long, lively and very ironical monologues, which make up one unique discourse through the whole book, the construction of a suitable image of Finland for potential tourists develops in parallel with the protagonist’s awareness of his own situation, by passing through check points of reference, providential intuitions and unforeseen crises. Finland is built up with the help of a complex, unusual and questioned set of features, occasionally by transfiguring events which have just happened to the protagonist in such a way that offers him even temporary solutions to his troubles. Eventually, in spite of itself, this imagined country turns out to be not only a place to sell with all its attractions, but also a kind of alter-ego, a friend to rely on, a therapeutic course to escape one’s own frailties, as well as a threatening presence for this thirty–year–old, methodical, awkward, naïve and funny brochure writer. This paper aims to reconstruct the development of these different courses and highlight the multifaceted image of Finland conveyed by the novel, together with the multiplicity of purposes for which the idea of this country in the protagonist’s mind is used. mer., 01 oct. 2025 13:56:30 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=682 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=683 Since its launch in 1974, the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) contains many references to the “Scandinavian medieval narratives”. In addition to characters and monsters, these references are used for the construction of space in different game universes and even for the organization of the multiverse, which encompasses different levels of existence where deities live. Through an analysis of the content of different works on the game and more specifically of the campaign framework Planescape (1994), this contribution proposes to explore the ways in which the references to Scandinavian medieval stories are used by the game’s authors to construct the structure of D&D’s multiverse. The first references to Scandinavian medieval narratives within the multiverse have developed from the foundations laid by Gary Gygax, one of the creators of D&D, and have then evolved through the different editions and transformed over time. In addition to this, the deployed Nordic imaginary is associated with moral principles inspired by axiologies from the fantasy literature and in particular the novels of authors such as Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock. It thus contributes to the “structuring procedures” of the games’ fictional space which situate the Scandinavian gods on different moral scales than Greek, Hindu, Native American and other deities. Hence, far from representing a travel back to the origins, these references always produce meanings that are always renewed and hybridized. Moreover, by observing the game more in detail, the observer sees that a specific games’ imagined geography is deployed within the D&D cosmology, one quite different from the usual representations of the concepts of “Borealism” and “Nordicity”. This genuinely mythical geography is inspired by the Eddas in order to give the planes of existence a truly mythical atmosphere in order to make them divine places, way beyond the physics of more classical universes. mer., 01 oct. 2025 14:51:14 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=683 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=685 The Old Norse poem Vafþrúðnismál presents the verbal duel between the god Óðinn and the giant Vafþrúðnir. The poem has generally been interpreted as a meeting that would allow Óðinn to acquire or confirm a knowledge held by the giant. The article proposes to analyze the text in order to determine the precise nature of this exchange between the two protagonists. A different interpretation emerges from this study: Óðinn does not meet Vafþrúðnir to acquire some new knowledge, but rather, as the text specifies, to test him and determine whether he is “wise” or “all wise”. jeu., 02 oct. 2025 09:30:40 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=685 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=686 This article explores the formative influence of religion on the historical Enlightenment in the Netherlands. The mainstream narratives of Enlightenment and religion do not necessarily have an antagonistic and mutually destructive relationship, where the annihilation of one formative narrative means the survival of the other—as formulated by Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) in the texts Dialektik der Aufklärung (first published in 1944) and Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (first published in 1947 under the title Eclipse of Reason), or as subsequently expressed in Jürgen Habermas’s concept of secularization in Glauben und Wissen (first published in 2001). In their thinking, however, the critical theorists mainly engaged with the German, English, and French Enlightenment traditions, leaving the Dutch tradition aside. While they saw the French Enlightenment as distinguished by its claim to universal validity, for example, or by the rigorous rejection of all aspects of religion, this article contends that it is the early appearance and its specific relationship to religion that characterizes the Enlightenment in the Netherlands. The practical relevance of critical theory or its theoretical conceptualization of the Enlightenment need, therefore, to be examined here. It appears that the critical thinkers, in their generalized thesis about the “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, restricted themselves to the German, French and Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment traditions, while unjustifiably disregarding the special Enlightenment tradition in the Netherlands, which was closely intertwined with an attitude of tolerance and humanism. In doing so, they overlooked the fact that Enlightenment can take different forms. jeu., 02 oct. 2025 11:24:26 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=686 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=688 According to the famous study on royal transubstantiation by Ernst Kantorowicz, a king incarnates “two bodies”: the body natural and the body politic, the perishable body of the human individual and the eternal body of the institution. The obligation to personify this duality—which ideally forms a perfect unity—seems to be at the root of the misery felt by Christian VII during the entirety of his reign. King of Denmark-Norway from 1766 to 1808, the mentally unstable monarch considered himself profoundly out of place, being in his own eyes an impostor, an intruder, a “false” king. Consequently, he spent his whole life trying to escape his own role. Through a consideration of Christian VII’s relation to representation—theatrical and political—and of his strange need to physically and emotionally re-enact certain capital punishments officially carried out on his own orders, I examine the itinerary of this singularly unfree admirer of the Enlightenment’s thoughts on individual freedom; an itinerary that throws an interesting light on the institution of the Danish royalty at the end of the eighteenth century. jeu., 02 oct. 2025 12:01:33 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=688 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=690 jeu., 02 oct. 2025 13:42:57 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=690 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=693 jeu., 02 oct. 2025 14:14:09 +0200 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=693 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=910 jeu., 27 nov. 2025 09:56:49 +0100 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=910