The aim of the conference was to develop the study of Comparative Literature through Nordic collaboration both in its own discipline and in Modern Language and Cultural studies. As the title for the conference suggests, the principal question for the conference was the challenge that the study of literature encounters in an age of digitalization and globalization. It was our aim to encourage discussion of how literary studies respond to the ongoing changes in media and technology, politics and economy. Many have argued that the Humanities currently are in a state of crisis. We believe that the discipline seldom has found itself in such an interesting and fruitful historical moment. Several of these questions have surfaced duringearlier media system changes, in particular during Romanticism and Modernism, which provided the conference with an historical frame. The conference Codex and Code also addressed questions of authenticity and originality, identity and gender, literary genres and reading practices, media and materiality, culture and popular culture, language and history, world literature, work aesthetics, translations, and canon formation.

This article is a quantitative and qualitative diachronic study of how the expression politically correct (PC) and related phrases are used in the American magazine Time from 1923 through 2006. The data show a dramatic increase in the frequency with which PC-phrases are used in the early 1990s. From this time onwards, the phrases are often used as a means of passing evaluative subjective opinions off as objectively reported facts, especially in reviews of cultural events, where they figure prominently. In contrast to earlier studies, our data show that PC-phrases are not inherently negative; this applies primarily to discourse on environment and business, where to be PC often implies being environmentally or socially conscious in a positive sense. Nevertheless, negative or ironic uses of the terms predominate. Most often they express criticism of unspoken cultural norms rather than being attempts to close down debate or criticizing the replacement of offensive terms by more neutral expressions

This essay argues that Andrea Dworkin’s much derided argument against pornography may still prove productive if read in relation to her fiction. Taking note of the fact that Dworkin’s own novels have been accused of being pornographic according to her criteria, the essay explores the possibility that her radical feminist anti-porn stance, inevitably described as something of a moralistic backlash by sex-liberals, could be seen as a continuation of the pornographic imagination it so vehemently protests. Through critical readings of Dworkin’s novels Ice and Fire and Mercy, as well as her autobiographical works and theoretical writings on pornography, the essay demonstrates that the contradic- tions that beset her writings echo the contradictions inherent in our contemporary under- standing of pornography. Much like the pornography she would resist, Dworkin’s writings invite a solipsistic mode of reading, the experiential rewards of which are not so much of an interpretive as of a sensual nature. In so doing, Dworkin’s fiction paradoxically proves an invaluable point of entry into the pornographic imagination, making evident its essentially monologic nature. While this circumstance may be damaging for her status as an agitator, it points to her continued—if as yet largely unacknowledged—importance as a writer.