Kroppen som en plåga. Kroppen som en välsignelse. Kroppen som ett gränsland

Abstract

Body as Torment. Body as Blessing. Body as borderland: The Symbolism of the Body and Illness in the Works of Tito Colliander. In my article, I examine the mental and physical illness of the body in the writing of the Finnish-Swedish writer Tito Colliander. Based on Yuri Lotman’s semiosphere theory, I show the cross-border function of the body in the text. The body suffering from a mental disorder or a physical pain is a kind of a filtering membrane that controls, filters, and adapts the external into the internal. The body can be considered as a borderland between the external and the internal, right and left, life and death, the male and the female, the upper and the lower, the spiritual and the material, heaven and earth, one’s own – alien. Based on Colliander’s writing, I show how the depiction of the body and the body’s diseases contributes to the literary representation and understanding of the fundamental oppositions of the culture.

Keywords

• Tito Colliander
• Finland-Swedish literature
• Border Studies
• the semiosphere and the notion of boundary
• Body Cultures Studies
• physical and mental illness