A Lyrical ‘I’ Beyond Fiction. Yahya Hassan and Autobiographical Poetry in Denmark After Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.

Abstract

This article focuses on contemporary autobiographical Danish poetry following the publication of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel Min kamp [My Struggle], originally published between 2009 and 2011 [My Struggle (2012–2018)]. Focusing on the 2013 poetry collection Yahya Hassan by the Danish-Palestinian poet Yahya Hassan, this article argues that the lyrical autobiographical voice escapes its narrative construction in fiction, illustrating a lyrical ‘I’ in contemporary autobiographical poetry that is ‘beyond fiction’. Paradoxically, this is due in part to Knausgaard’s novel, where moving beyond fiction is about discovering an artistic and authentic way to re-establish a proximity to the world. Through the examination of Hassan’s poetry collection and the immediate literary context, this article explores the underlying moral, aesthetic, and mediatized aspects of lyrical self-presentation in contemporary Danish poetry, and more generally. Self-disclosure and the use of private material are therefore not strategies for doing away with the subject but, rather, ways of reclaiming it.