Magnus Ullén received his PhD from Uppsala University in December 2001. He became docent (associate professor) in Comparative Literature at Stockholm University in 2009, and Professor of English at Østfold University College, Norway, and at Karlstad University in 2012, where he worked for ten years. In 2018, he joined the English Department at Stockholm University.

Magnus will be joining the literature department for research reasons in the academic year 2024/25.

I am currently not teaching.

Political Correctness: A Conceptual History

Perhaps no other concept has so drastically altered the nature of contemporary public debate as that of 'political correctness', or 'PC' for short.

The concept rose to public awareness in the early 1990s in relation to debates about higher education in the United States, but it very quickly spread to countries on the other side of the Atlantic, and has become the hub of debates about ethnicity, feminism, free speech, and democracy ever since. Even so, there is as yet a very poor understanding of how this highly controversial concept emerged. The present study rectifies this situation. Drawing on materials made available digitally through various research and newspaper databases, the study provides the first empirically substantiated account of the history of the concept. Combining procedures adapted from corpus linguistics with rhetorical analysis, the project also considers how developments in (leftwing) critical theory no less than in (rightwing) conspiracy theory are enmeshed with the history of concept of PC.

Throughout, the project provides empirical evidence that has previously not been available when discussing PC, to enable us to talk about this concept on the basis of facts rather than pre-conceived ideological assumptions. Besides making clear how, when, and why PC became a controversial concept, the study makes substantial contributions to the history of the women's liberation movement in the USA, literary theory, American studies, and rhetoric.

a. Monographs

Bara för dig: pornografi, konsumtion, berättande. Stockholm: Vertigo, 2009.

The Half-Vanished Structure: Hawthorne’s Allegorical Dialectics. Peter Lang: Bern, 2004.

b. Edited volumes

”Någonstädes mellan sol och söder, mellan nord och natt.” Festskrift till Torsten Pettersson. Stockholm: Gidlunds, 2015. Red. Jenny Björklund, Ann-Sofie Lönngren, Mattias Pirholt, Magnus Ullén & Maria Wennström Wohrne.

Våldsamma fantasier. Studier i fiktionsvåldets funktion och attraktion. Kulturvetenskapliga skriftserien 2, Karlstads Universitet, 2014.

The Later Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Special Inssue. 35:2 (2009). 1–132. With David Greven. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40196822)

c. Articles

“The Feminist Origins of ‘Political Correctness’: PC terms in JSTOR.” Feminist Theory. (2024) Online 15 May: (https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001241248)

“The Ugly Smell of Nortoniensis: Charles Eliot Norton and Hawthorne’s Civil War Romance.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. 67.1 (2021): 591–636. (10.1353/esq.2021.0001)

“Political Correctness in Sweden: A Borderland Conceptual History.” Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations. Eds. Dag Blanck & Adam Hjortén. University of Minnesota Press. 2021. 277–292. (https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv1v3gr1q.18)

“The Art of Judgment: Postcritique and the Particular Case.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 19.4 (2020): 195–217. (https://doi.org/10.35360/njes.608)

“Unfinished Work: Lincoln, Hawthorne, and the Situation of Literature,” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 46.4 (2019): 860–887. (https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2019.0040)

“Fascisten som anti-fascist: Teratologen, kritiken och litteraturen som vara,” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 2–3 (2019): 68–77. (https://doi.org/10.54797/tfl.v49i2-3.6634)

“‘The Elevation of Sensitivity Over Truth’: Political Correctness and Related Phrases in the Time Magazine Corpus.” Applied Linguistics 40.2 (2019): 265–287. With Solveig Granath. (https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx019)

“Hawthorne’s Unfinished Romances.” Nathaniel Hawthorne in Context. Ed. Monika Elbert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 2018. 252–261. (https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316271537.025)

“The Problem of Modernity: Hawthorne Criticism, Faith, and the Literary Situation.” Orbis Litterarum 72.4 (2017): 265–293. (https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12135)

“Reading Literature Rhetorically in Education: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Prison-Door’ as an Exercise in Close Reading.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 15.2 (2016):142–158. (10.35360/NJES.367)

“‘A Tangled Web of Mindfuck’: Andrea Dworkin and the Truth of Pornography.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 35.1 (2016): 145–171. (10.1353/tsw.2016.0014)

“The Situation of the Text: Erotic and Pornographic in Barthes’s Camera Lucida.” Critical Quarterly 57.2 (2015): 72–89. (https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12195)

“Kristusprincipen. Om litteraturtolkning och trons retorik.” Samlaren 135 (2014): 129–162. (https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:795205/FULLTEXT01.pdf)

“Utøya 2083: Terror, Performatives, and the Rhetorical Situation.” Narratives of Risk: Interdisciplinary Studies. Eds. Karen Patrick Knutsen, Sigmund Kvam, Peter Langemeyer, Anastasia Parianou, and Kåre Solfjeld. Münster: Waxmann, 2013. 339–363.

“The Solipsism of Pornography: Speech Act Theory and the Anti-Porn Position.” Sexuality and Culture17.2 (2013): 321–347. (10.1007/s12119-012-9154-1)

“The Excess of Porn: Response to Julian Hanich.” Jump Cut 53 (2011). (http://ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/Ullen/index.html)

“Late Hawthorne: A Polemical Introduction.” The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 35:2 (2009). 1–25. With David Greven. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44695488)

“Politikern som politikerföraktare: Thomas Bodströms Rymmaren och den retoriska situationen.” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 2 (2009): 5–19. (https://doi.org/10.54797/tfl.v39i2.12157)

“Pornography and its Critical Reception: Toward a Theory of Masturbation.” Jump Cut 51 (2009). (http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/UllenPorn/)

“Masturbation as a Mode of Reading: Towards a Conception of the Orphaned Texts of Postmodernity.” Carriages and Computers: Aesthetic Technologies in Literature from the 18th to the 21st Century. Eds. Yngve Sandhei Jacobsen och Gunnar Foss. Oslo: Tapir, 2009. 97–109.

“The Manuscript of Septimius: Revisiting the Site of Hawthorne’s ‘Failure’.” Studies in the Novel 40:3 (2008): 239–267. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/29533873)

“Modernism och utopi: Fredric Jameson, Peter Luthersson och litteraturens värde.” Samlaren 128 (2007): 233–264. (https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:39819/FULLTEXT01.pdf)

“Reading with the Eye of Faith: The Structural Principle of Hawthorne’s Romances.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48:1 (2006): 1–36. (10.1353/tsl.2006.0004)

“Dream-Cum-Truth: Postmodern Narrativity and Hardcore Porn.” Literature and Visual Culture. Ed. Dagný Kristjánsdóttir. Reykjavik: University of Inceland Press, 2005. 394–408.

“En ironisk historia: Paul de Man och historiebegreppet.” Samlaren 125 (2004): 204–36. (https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:39817/FULLTEXT01.pdf)

“Den obegripliga maskinen: Paul de Man och textens temporalitet.” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 1 (2004): 109–132.

“Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.” The Explicator 59:3 (2001): 128–130. (https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940109597109)

“Dante in Paradise: The End of Allegorical Interpretation.” New Literary History 32:1 (2001): 177–199. (https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2001.0010)

d. Reviews

Anna Hultman. Litteratur vid pornografins gräns. Erotik i svensk prosa 1819–2019. Malmö: Vertigo, 2022. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 53.2–3 (2023): 310–316. (10.54797/tfl.v53i2-3.23680)

“Psychoanalyzing Hawthorne.” David Diamond. Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation. Routledge, 2021. The Henry James Review 43.2 (2022): E-1–E-5. (https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2022.0005)

Sarah Meer. American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, c. 1820–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 47 (2021): 171–175. (https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.47.1.0171)

Ulf Olsson. Listening for the Secret: The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 1-2 (2018): 71–74. (https://doi.org/10.54797/tfl.v48i1-2.7588)

Erik van Ooijen. Dödsporr. Etik, estetik, våld. Stockholm. Faethon, 2016. Samlaren 138 (2017). 264–69. (https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1187269/FULLTEXT01.pdf)

Jeanne Cortiel. With a Barbarous Din: Race and Ethnic Encounter in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. American Studies in Scandinavia. 49.2 (2017): 115–18. (https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v49i2.5680)

Roger Edholm. The Written and the Unwritten World of Philip Roth: Fiction, Nonfiction and Borderline Aesthetics in the Roth Books. Örebro Studies in Literary History and Criticism 12. Örebro 2012. Samlaren 135 (2014): 285–294. (https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:766013/FULLTEXT01.pdf)

Michael Boyden. Predicting the Past: The Paradoxes of American Literary History. Leuven: Leuven UP, 2009. American Studies in Scandinavia 43.2 (2012): 123–126. (https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v43i2.4381)

Anders Johansson. Nonfiction. Göteborg. Glänta 2008. Samlaren 129 (2008): 495–500. (http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:352476/FULLTEXT01.pdf)