Per Bäckström

Per Bäckström (born 1959) is a Swedish literary scholar and affiliated professor in comparative literature at the Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. He has worked as professor in comparative Literature, Karlstad University 2010–2019, and as associate professor at the Department of Culture and Literature, University of Tromsø, Norway 1996–2010. He took part in the founding of European Network for Avant-garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) in 2007, and was the leader of the Membership Commission 2007–2011. He has published studies on Bruno K. Öijer, Henri Michaux, Gunnar Ekelöf, Mikhail Bakhtin, intermediality, the grotesque, concrete poetry, performance, avant-garde and neo-avant-garde. He has made a critical reading of Michel Riffaterre's Semiotics of Poetry, where he introduces Riffaterre's theory, explains why it failed to make success, and criticizes it for its lack of consistency when it comes to experimental poetry. He has especially studied the use of the notions of “modernism” and “avant-garde” in Romance speaking languages versus English, and the role of the peripheries in relation to the supposed centres of the avant-garde in the 20th Century. He currently is working on the Swedish avant-gardist Öyvind Fahlström and The Anti-Aesthetics of Rock.