This course addresses the theme of freedom. It explores this theme by studying how writing shapes those cultural and social networks which have freedom as their goal in the period after 1780 and up to the present day. The course draws attention to the ways in which developments in written culture can be characterised by conflict, opposition and interaction between mainstream cultures on the one hand and sub- or counter-cultures on the other. It looks, too, at how these tensions play out in writing as opposed to other media, such as visual, musical and oral forms of cultural expression.

The course is interdisciplinary and includes methodological approaches from both the humanities and the social sciences. It looks, for instance, at political documents, legal texts, works of fiction, letters, song lyrics, online communication, multimodal texts and translations. The course employs a comparative perspective which builds further on the two obligatory courses SKR301 and SKR302, and it views its English-language texts in the light of issues that also apply to New-Norwegian written culture.

The goal in studying these texts is to explore how ideas about freedom appear in – and influence – different written cultures. Medium, social class, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, nationality, access to the internet, and levels of reading and writing skills are among the factors that have an impact on these processes; as such they will be central to our study on this course.