Mediations of Nostalgia: Aesthetics, Intermediality, Ecology
This study is the first of its kind, investigating the aesthetic and intermedial potential of nostalgia. Nostalgia studies is a fast growing interdisciplinary research field, but it has predominantly focused on the thematic, political, historical and sociological aspects of nostalgia. This study fills a gap in creating an increased awareness of nostalgia’s aesthetic and intermedial aspects, and how it is entangled with current issues as well as how it is mediated and represented. The monograph also investigates nostalgia’s potential in ecocritical discourses.
Final report
The primary aim of this project has been to complete a monograph that builds on sociologist Fred Davis's assertion that nostalgia belongs to a unique aesthetic modality (Davis 1979) and examines nostalgia from an aesthetic perspective. Recently, nostalgia as a general concept and the scientific field of nostalgia studies have been intensely researched from political, social, psychological, media, and historical perspectives. Except for studies on nostalgia and marketing, scientific interest in how media specifically creates nostalgic experiences has been relatively low. Studies on media and nostalgia (Niemeyer 2014; Lizardi 2016 and 2019) have mostly focused on how nostalgia functions in a modern, digital media landscape rather than how individual aesthetic products convey nostalgia. Therefore, the aim of this monograph project has been to detail how fictional media types (literature, film, TV) mediate nostalgia by meticulously depicting how nostalgia is aesthetically created.
The concrete result of this project is the monograph Mediations of Nostalgia: Experience, Intermediality, and Aesthetics, which will be published at the end of 2025 as the first publication in the new series World Literature and Intermediality by Edinburgh University Press. The book is based on several theses about nostalgia and media that together build a coherent argument for how nostalgia is mediated from specific media products to a recipient: (1) nostalgic experiences are not only linked to biographical memories, but nostalgic longing can also be for fictional, imaginary, cultural places and times beyond lived experience; (2) nostalgia is a highly polymorphic complex emotion where opposing emotional registers of joy and sorrow blend into the bittersweet; (3) nostalgia is not always a polymorphic feeling with a distinct longing for a specific time or place, but can also be a mood with lower cognitive involvement; (4) nostalgia is strongly linked to entropic and teleological notions of the disintegration of everything, and is thus a strongly existential feeling; (5) nostalgia is fundamentally an essential, private human feeling that is, however, coded by cultural contexts.
The book is divided into three parts. Based on these fundamental theses about the nature of nostalgia, the first part (Experience) describes what we mean by having a nostalgic experience. Here, a detailed taxonomy of the different components of the nostalgic experience is created, what triggers nostalgia, and the various types of nostalgic longing. It is crucial to understand this because mediations and fictionalizations of nostalgia largely involve simulations of how we experience nostalgia in our daily lives. The second section (Intermediality) discusses how mediations of nostalgia concretely occur. This part is based on intermedial theory, primarily as developed and defined by Lars Elleström, and studies the complexity of how nostalgia is communicated in a media-centered communication model between producer, media product, and recipient. Furthermore, it describes how different media types (film, literature, theater, opera, comics, video games) have different affordances to create nostalgic experiences in the recipient. The final part (Aesthetics) concretizes what is meant by nostalgic aesthetics through fundamental investigations of various ways nostalgia is mediated and aestheticized: through narrative strategies, style and form, media representation, sensory aesthetics, nostalgic moods (tropes). The sections in the final part of the book contain numerous close readings of entire or parts of media products from geographically diverse areas to illustrate the various ways nostalgia can be mediated and create nostalgic experiences in recipients. These case studies also include specific discussions about the contextual conditions that affect representations of nostalgia: the climate crisis, migration, and (post)modernity.
The project does not discuss mediations of nostalgia from an empirical standpoint but provides a theoretical review of various ways nostalgia can potentially be triggered in recipients by studying several different aesthetic strategies based on essential definitions of how nostalgia is constructed. The somewhat speculative nature of the study is mitigated by the fact that the study is largely based on a multitude of empirical studies in sociology and existential psychology (Batcho; Routledge; Sedikides; Wildschut et al.). As the title of the series in which the book is published suggests, World Literature is used as a corpus (redefined to include multiple media: world media and not just literature) and to a lesser extent as a comparative method between different geopolitical contexts that code nostalgic experiences. The book makes a significant contribution to how emotions are mediated through fictional media in general, and nostalgia in particular. It is the first study to examine nostalgia from a broad intermedial perspective. As a detailed and comprehensive study of nostalgic aesthetics within several fictional media, it is quite unique and a significant contribution to nostalgia, intermediality, and reception studies.
The opportunity to read up on the rapidly growing body of academic literature on nostalgia, as well as adjacent areas, and reflect on important aesthetic and media issues during the sabbatical has been a gift. Likewise, presenting, discussing, and ventilating ongoing research in various social and academic contexts has been very beneficial for the project. The two planned stays abroad have greatly contributed to the project's success, not only for all the constructive feedback they have generated but also because it is creatively stimulating to be in different academic environments than at home. I spent a month in Berlin at Freie Universität where I had conversations with Tobias Becker, a leading nostalgia researcher, and other colleagues in the interdisciplinary research group Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits. However, my three months at ELTS (European Languages and Transcultural Studies) at UCLA were particularly productive, with presentations for colleagues and students about my project, especially within LENS (Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies) and The Cybercene Lab Our Multispecies Futures in a Transformed World. Although my project did not receive the ecocritical focus initially planned (that will be another monograph), much collaboration took place within the digital humanities program led by Dominic Thomas. As a result of this collaboration, Linnaeus University and the Faculty of Humanities at UCLA are developing an MoU.
In addition to the planned stays abroad, I was a fellow at Villa San Michele in Capri during May and June where I presented my project to other fellows and in a podcast. Furthermore, I presented my project at CIPA (Centre Interdisciplinaire de Poétique Appliquée) at University of Liège (April 8), was invited as a plenary speaker on mediations of nostalgia and nostalgic affordances at two conferences on intermediality organized by The Intermedial Strand (University of Edinburgh), and at the annual nostalgia conference organized by Gdansk University. Additionally, I lectured on nostalgia and the Anthropocene at Università degli Studi Roma Tre. An interesting collaboration project was initiated by me and department head Alexandra Stiernspetz at the Småland Museum in Växjö, where their letter archive at the Emigrant Institute was examined from a nostalgic perspective by master's students in English at Linnaeus University (funded by the Swedish Arts Council).
In addition to writing the monograph, the sabbatical year has also contributed to several other publications closely related to the nostalgia project (see publication list for details). Notably, there are two co-authored chapters for The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia ("Nostalgia and Literature" and "Anthropocene Nostalgia") and a monograph Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media (Lexington, 2024). Deviations from the project plan are primarily noticeable through these two changes: (1) I soon realized that there would not be room to thoroughly examine the relationship between ecology and nostalgia in the way I had wished because the focus was on framing the purely aesthetic dimensions of nostalgic mediation, and as a result (2) I understood that intermediality as theory and method became a very productive and necessary approach to understanding how mediations work and how different media relate to nostalgia in different ways.
Since my writing productivity far exceeded my expectations, I already have material for another monograph on nostalgia, tentatively titled The Moods of Nostalgia, where I zoom in on how aesthetic nostalgia works within certain specific mood areas where emotions, affect, embodiment, recurring tropes, and motifs interplay. This project will thus be a departure from the upcoming monograph. During the work on the monograph, I have been broadly inspired by how cognitive poetics, neuropsychology, aesthetics, reception, and media theories interact to communicate affect. I applied for and was granted research funding (so-called excellence funds at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University) for the project Affective Intermediality. Within the framework of this project, I will take a broader approach to the mediation of affect, first in an international workshop at Linnaeus University in June and then the establishment of a new research cluster within the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies.
The concrete result of this project is the monograph Mediations of Nostalgia: Experience, Intermediality, and Aesthetics, which will be published at the end of 2025 as the first publication in the new series World Literature and Intermediality by Edinburgh University Press. The book is based on several theses about nostalgia and media that together build a coherent argument for how nostalgia is mediated from specific media products to a recipient: (1) nostalgic experiences are not only linked to biographical memories, but nostalgic longing can also be for fictional, imaginary, cultural places and times beyond lived experience; (2) nostalgia is a highly polymorphic complex emotion where opposing emotional registers of joy and sorrow blend into the bittersweet; (3) nostalgia is not always a polymorphic feeling with a distinct longing for a specific time or place, but can also be a mood with lower cognitive involvement; (4) nostalgia is strongly linked to entropic and teleological notions of the disintegration of everything, and is thus a strongly existential feeling; (5) nostalgia is fundamentally an essential, private human feeling that is, however, coded by cultural contexts.
The book is divided into three parts. Based on these fundamental theses about the nature of nostalgia, the first part (Experience) describes what we mean by having a nostalgic experience. Here, a detailed taxonomy of the different components of the nostalgic experience is created, what triggers nostalgia, and the various types of nostalgic longing. It is crucial to understand this because mediations and fictionalizations of nostalgia largely involve simulations of how we experience nostalgia in our daily lives. The second section (Intermediality) discusses how mediations of nostalgia concretely occur. This part is based on intermedial theory, primarily as developed and defined by Lars Elleström, and studies the complexity of how nostalgia is communicated in a media-centered communication model between producer, media product, and recipient. Furthermore, it describes how different media types (film, literature, theater, opera, comics, video games) have different affordances to create nostalgic experiences in the recipient. The final part (Aesthetics) concretizes what is meant by nostalgic aesthetics through fundamental investigations of various ways nostalgia is mediated and aestheticized: through narrative strategies, style and form, media representation, sensory aesthetics, nostalgic moods (tropes). The sections in the final part of the book contain numerous close readings of entire or parts of media products from geographically diverse areas to illustrate the various ways nostalgia can be mediated and create nostalgic experiences in recipients. These case studies also include specific discussions about the contextual conditions that affect representations of nostalgia: the climate crisis, migration, and (post)modernity.
The project does not discuss mediations of nostalgia from an empirical standpoint but provides a theoretical review of various ways nostalgia can potentially be triggered in recipients by studying several different aesthetic strategies based on essential definitions of how nostalgia is constructed. The somewhat speculative nature of the study is mitigated by the fact that the study is largely based on a multitude of empirical studies in sociology and existential psychology (Batcho; Routledge; Sedikides; Wildschut et al.). As the title of the series in which the book is published suggests, World Literature is used as a corpus (redefined to include multiple media: world media and not just literature) and to a lesser extent as a comparative method between different geopolitical contexts that code nostalgic experiences. The book makes a significant contribution to how emotions are mediated through fictional media in general, and nostalgia in particular. It is the first study to examine nostalgia from a broad intermedial perspective. As a detailed and comprehensive study of nostalgic aesthetics within several fictional media, it is quite unique and a significant contribution to nostalgia, intermediality, and reception studies.
The opportunity to read up on the rapidly growing body of academic literature on nostalgia, as well as adjacent areas, and reflect on important aesthetic and media issues during the sabbatical has been a gift. Likewise, presenting, discussing, and ventilating ongoing research in various social and academic contexts has been very beneficial for the project. The two planned stays abroad have greatly contributed to the project's success, not only for all the constructive feedback they have generated but also because it is creatively stimulating to be in different academic environments than at home. I spent a month in Berlin at Freie Universität where I had conversations with Tobias Becker, a leading nostalgia researcher, and other colleagues in the interdisciplinary research group Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits. However, my three months at ELTS (European Languages and Transcultural Studies) at UCLA were particularly productive, with presentations for colleagues and students about my project, especially within LENS (Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies) and The Cybercene Lab Our Multispecies Futures in a Transformed World. Although my project did not receive the ecocritical focus initially planned (that will be another monograph), much collaboration took place within the digital humanities program led by Dominic Thomas. As a result of this collaboration, Linnaeus University and the Faculty of Humanities at UCLA are developing an MoU.
In addition to the planned stays abroad, I was a fellow at Villa San Michele in Capri during May and June where I presented my project to other fellows and in a podcast. Furthermore, I presented my project at CIPA (Centre Interdisciplinaire de Poétique Appliquée) at University of Liège (April 8), was invited as a plenary speaker on mediations of nostalgia and nostalgic affordances at two conferences on intermediality organized by The Intermedial Strand (University of Edinburgh), and at the annual nostalgia conference organized by Gdansk University. Additionally, I lectured on nostalgia and the Anthropocene at Università degli Studi Roma Tre. An interesting collaboration project was initiated by me and department head Alexandra Stiernspetz at the Småland Museum in Växjö, where their letter archive at the Emigrant Institute was examined from a nostalgic perspective by master's students in English at Linnaeus University (funded by the Swedish Arts Council).
In addition to writing the monograph, the sabbatical year has also contributed to several other publications closely related to the nostalgia project (see publication list for details). Notably, there are two co-authored chapters for The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia ("Nostalgia and Literature" and "Anthropocene Nostalgia") and a monograph Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media (Lexington, 2024). Deviations from the project plan are primarily noticeable through these two changes: (1) I soon realized that there would not be room to thoroughly examine the relationship between ecology and nostalgia in the way I had wished because the focus was on framing the purely aesthetic dimensions of nostalgic mediation, and as a result (2) I understood that intermediality as theory and method became a very productive and necessary approach to understanding how mediations work and how different media relate to nostalgia in different ways.
Since my writing productivity far exceeded my expectations, I already have material for another monograph on nostalgia, tentatively titled The Moods of Nostalgia, where I zoom in on how aesthetic nostalgia works within certain specific mood areas where emotions, affect, embodiment, recurring tropes, and motifs interplay. This project will thus be a departure from the upcoming monograph. During the work on the monograph, I have been broadly inspired by how cognitive poetics, neuropsychology, aesthetics, reception, and media theories interact to communicate affect. I applied for and was granted research funding (so-called excellence funds at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University) for the project Affective Intermediality. Within the framework of this project, I will take a broader approach to the mediation of affect, first in an international workshop at Linnaeus University in June and then the establishment of a new research cluster within the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies.