Mid Sweden University

This article, written in the form of an untimely academic novella is a text, which explores academic authoring as thinking and writing practice in a place called Sweden. The aim is on inquiries of geographical space, place and academia and the interrelation between the social and symbolic formation of class, gender and whiteness. The novella uses different writing strategies and visual representations such as documentary writing and photographing from the research process, letters to a friend, and memories from childhood based on three generations of women’s lives. The methodology can be described as a critical reflexive writing strategy inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and literary fiction, and additionally by methodological approaches in the humanities and social sciences, such as theorising of letters, memory work and narrative and autobiographical approaches. In particular, it draws on work by the theorist critic and writer of fiction, Hélène Cixous, and the feminist author and theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, drawing on interpretation of Cixous´ essay Enter the Theatre and Gilman´s story The Yellow Wallpaper. Characteristics of the untimely academic novella elaborate with possible forms of the symbolic, visual and performative photographic and sensory in writing research; furthermore time, social change and unfinal endings play a pervasive role. It may be read as a story that situates and theorises embodiement, landscape and power through the interweaving of forest rural farming spaces and academic office spaces by tracing autobiographical imprints of an untimely feminist author. “The Snow Angel and Other Imprints” is the second article in a trilogy of untimely academic novellas. The first, with the title “The Professor’s Chair”, was published in Swedish in 2007 (in the anthology Genus och det akademiska skrivandets former (Eds.) Bränström Öhman & Livholts) and forthcoming in English in the journal Life Writing 2009/2010.