Knut Hamsun Research Articles

Knut Hamsun, Novelist: A Critical Assessment by Sverre Lyngstad

Knut Hamsun, Novelist: A Critical Assessment by Sverre Lyngstad

Knut Hamsun as a Travel Writer: In Wonderland

RÉSUMÉ: Le livre In Wonderland (1903) de Knut Hamsun est un journal de bord tiré de son voyage à travers la Russie et le Caucase jusqu’à Constantinople en 1899. Bien qu’ayant été récemment traduit en anglais par Sverre Lyngstad (2004), il demeure l’un des ouvrages de Hamsun les moins étudiés. Cet article retracera l’attitude de Hamsun envers la littérature du voyage et abordera son périple vers l’Orient comme un voyage à rebours au cœur de sa propre vie, aux lieux de l’esprit. À son retour, Wonderland deviendra l’appellation qu’utilisera Hamsun pour désigner le Nordland, le comté de la Norvège où il a grandi, et non l’Orient.

THE IBSEN PHENOMENON

In October 1891, in the formidable presence of Ibsen himself, Knut Hamsun delivered a mostly derogatory account of Ibsen's career as a writer of social dramas that employed a simplistic psychology ...

Juliane's speech: Knut Hamsun's Play <i>In the Grip of Life (Livet i vold)</i>

My article will present an examination of interactional styles in dialogues created by Knut Hamsun in his 1910 play In the Grip of Life (Livet i vold). Hamsun equipped his protagonists with a particular speech. The point of the analysis is to investigate how Hamsun fleshed out his protagonists' speech styles, what he deemed as the most suitable and appropriate speech for women and men, and how he lets them transgress it. In fact, Hamsun uses transgression of the traditional rules of gender communication as his creative technique. Following Weber-Knapp's strategy, my analysis will focus on the following: length and frequency of speech contributions, interruptions, and initiating and responding utterances

Acting Out: Comparative Analyses of Romantic Realism in Stepen Crane and Knut Hamsun

Acting Out: Comparative Analyses of Romantic Realism in Stepen Crane and Knut Hamsun

Integrity and Uses of Nature

I contrast the integrity of nature understood as a community with the integrity of nature understood as an organism. Whereas the latter is typified by nature in its pristine condition and precludes almost all human uses of nature and so excludes the human from the natural, I argue that the integrity of nature (ecological integrity) allows for human uses of nature to sustain human life when nature is understood as a community, which includes humans among its members. Cultural landscapes, understood in a narrow sense, are manifestations of such uses and of man's being in nature on nature's terms. An example of a literary expression of this view is Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil. As an ethical value, ecological integrity imposes certain moral constraints on our uses of nature, on the manner in which humans live and co-exist.

›Segen der Erde‹ im Kampf gegen den ›Bolschewismus der Poesie‹

In 1920 Knut Hamsun received the Nobel Prize for Literature — explicitly for his novel Growth of the Soil. The process leading up to this decision is full of irony. Hamsun, a modernist, appeared suspect to the decidedly anti-modernist committee. Only his atypical rustic novel of 1917 was appreciated as a »monumental« work of art, containing a »healthy« image of humans; it was hoped that the enfant terrible would continue to follow the path he finally seemed to have chosen. But Growth of the Soil is not as uplifting as the committee thought it to be (moreover, it became a cult novel of the Nazis). Nor did Hamsun’s following novels live up to the anachronistic expectations of the Swedish Academy of the time. But considering the many questionable choices of the Nobel Prize committee, precisely Hamsun is an »undoubtedly major figure« (George Steiner) among the prize holders.

A History of Norwegian Literature

Long under the cultural domination of Denmark and the political hegemony of Sweden, Norway first defined itself through its literature and continues to do so to our day. A History of Norwegian Literature reviews the complex role literature has played in Norway since runic times. Beginning with rock carvings five millennia old, Norwegian literature first came to flower with the Norse poets of the ninth century, who chronicled the heroism of Viking explorers and conquerers. The authors describe the subsequent progression of Norwegian literature through the middle ages and the baroque to Ludvig Holberg and the age of enlightenment, and from thence to the cultural debates of the nineteenth century, the dramas of Ibsen, the psychological novels of Sigurd Hoel, the modernist poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, and the postmodernism of the present. The works of Nobel Prize winners Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun, and Bjornstjerne Bjornson are covered in some detail, and separate chapters are devoted to children's literature and women writers in Norwegian literature. Like other volumes in A History of Scandinavian Literatures; A History of Norwegian Literature views the literature of Norway not only as part of an interrelated Scandinavian tradition but as part of world literature. A comparative approach is used throughout, and social and cultural history feature prominently. Contributors to Volume 2 include leading scholars James E. Knirk, Kathleen Stokker, Harald Naess, James McFarlane, William Mishler, Jan I. Sjavik, Margaret O'Leary, and Faith Ingwersen.

Triangular Structures in Knut Hamsun's "Pan"

Triangular Structures in Knut Hamsun's "Pan"

Address upon Accepting the Theodor W. Adorno Prize on 1 October 1989

I would like to thank my hometown of Frankfurt and especially the members of the selection committee for awarding me the Adorno Prize. I am especially pleased that you gave me the prize this year, since-several months ago comments were made in the various media by different people about my friends Adorno and Horkheimer, comments so contemptible that I want to take this opportunity to protest yet again against the misrepresentation and distortion of these men and their work. Allow me to take advantage of this opportunity to remind myself of the potential historical continuity of a human life to reminisce, that is, in an emphatic rather than a sentimental or idealizing way, to recollect what is still worth remembering about a person, along with his weaknesses, even those that could have been avoided. I want to try to explain what in particular moved me today to remember Adorno, something that has become a daily occurrence for me. It was more than anything else the spirit of collegial and intellectual solidarity that bound us together. For example, when I was analyzing the work of Knut Hamsun in the 1930s and had detected, by way of a textual analysis, a sympathy for National Socialism on Hamsun's part that had as yet gone unrecognized, Adomo contributed to my diagnosis by suggesting a comparison between Hamsun and Sibelius, in whose music he found similar cynical motifs which, whether expressed verbally or in music, glorified a rigid concept of nature with pantheistic overtones. Our cooperative efforts came to fruition in the theses on anti-Semitism in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and in studies of the authoritarian personality and of the demagogic techniques of agitators. Both of us believed

Earth mother or femme fatale? femininity as envisioned by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Knut Hamsun

Earth mother or femme fatale? femininity as envisioned by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Knut Hamsun

In the Age of Prose: Literary and Philosophical Essays

Acknowledgments Preface 1. The poet in the age of prose: reflections on Hegel's Aesthetics and Rilke's Duino Elegies 2. The broken tradition: an address 3. Nietzsche's last words about art and truth 4. Thinking about poetry, Holderlin and Heidegger 5. Karl Kraus 6. Literature and political responsibility: apropos the letters of Thomas Mann 7. The taking back of the Ninth Symphony: reflections on Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus 8. Thomas Mann's diaries and the search for identity 9. Knut Hamsun 10. Observations on psychoanalysis and modern literature 11. The dismantling of a marionette theatre or, psychology and the misinterpretation of literature 12. Man ashamed 13. Theodor Fontane: the extraordinary education of a Prussian apothecary 14. The little world of Wilhelm Busch.

Political Trials: Gordian Knots in the Law

take issues of responsibility, conscience, representation, and legitimacy, which are tied in tight political and legal knots, and force us to face questions about our public identity, our standards for public policy, and our sense of history. Ron Christenson explores how political trials, especially those within the rule of law, engage society's conflicting values and loyalties. He examines numerous political throughout history, bringing into question basic foundations of law, politics, and society. Christenson classifies political according to the issues they generate in the political sphere: partisan are spurious legal proceedings but politically expedient; trials of corruption and insanity raise questions of public and personal responsibility; trials of involve problems of conscience; of highlight the nature of representation and the relationship of the part to the whole; and trials of regimes engage the most fundamental concept of both law and politics--legitimacy. Political Trials brings these considerations to bear on some of the best-known cases in history, including the Gunpowder Plot; the Spanish Inquisition; the Dreyfus affair; the Nuremburg trials; of dissenters such as Socrates, Thomas More, Roger Williams, and the Berrigan brothers; and of nationalists such as Joan of Arc, Gandhi, Knut Hamsun, and the Irish republicans. Since the first edition appeared, a number of notable political have raised critical issues for society. Shocking public exposures about the Guildford 4 and Maguire 7 shook the British criminal justice establishment, while in the United States concerning the beating of Rodney King led up to the O.J. Simpson spectacle and a host of parallel questions. The of right-wing terrorists such as Paul Hill, found guilty of murdering an abortion doctor, and Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, parallel the case of left-wing dissenter Karl Armstrong in the 1970s. Finally, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee provides a test case of whether a nation can not only remember but grant amnesty and achieve true reconciliation. In examining the dilemmas involved in these trials, Christenson shows how they make a positive contribution to an open and democratic society. Political Trials will be an important addition to the libraries of historians, legal scholars, and political scientists.

Representation of Consciousness inPan: Knut Hamsun as Modernist

(1985). Representation of Consciousness in Pan: Knut Hamsun as Modernist. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures: Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 195-206.

Sigbj�rn Obstfelder and America

by SVERRE ARESTAD 9 Sigbjtrn Obstfelder and America The the letters late nineteenth-century reproduced here Norwegian were written poet by the late nineteenth-century Norwegian poet Sigbj0rn Obstfelder (1866-1900) to his youngest brother Herman Fredrik (1871-1954). Herman had emigrated to America when he was only seventeen years old and had settled in Milwaukee. During this time Sigbjprn was studying, first at the University of Oslo and subsequently at a technical school in the Norwegian capital, where he was preparing to become a draftsman. The first letter included here was written in Stavanger in August, 1890, before Sigbjprn left for America to join his brother. The first time Sigbjprn ever wrote to his brother was from Kristiania in October, 1884, just after he arrived there. Herman, only fourteen years old, was still in Stavanger, where he would study and work until he sailed for America in the summer of 1888. The first letter in which Sigbjprn mentions to Herman that he also is coming to America is dated July 8, 1888, and the first letter he addressed to his brother in Milwaukee was in October, 1888. He wrote several more times, from either Stavanger or Kristiania, before he joined his brother in Milwaukee in the summer of 1890. After several months in 253 Sverre Arestad Milwaukee Sigbj0rn quit his job there and moved to the Washington Heights section of Chicago. His "America letters," all of which are included here, were written from the Chicago area between February 19 and August 3, 1891. Also included here, because they throw a good deal of light upon Sigbjprn's reactions to America, are two letters written from Stavanger after he returned to Norway. Other correspondence containing references to the United States, from both before and after his stay here, might well have been included in order to give a complete picture of Sigbjprn's impressions of America. There are also mentions of America in his subsequent literary works that could have been incorporated. But since a limit had to be set, it seemed best to comment on the specific references to America in these letters and other works in the introduction rather than to reprint a large body of material which contained only scattered comments on America. In studies of individual Norwegians in America the success story has been predominant, particularly in the areas of material and professional achievement. Sigbj0rn Obstfelder' s encounter with America opens up a new dimension. One can refer to Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson's experiences in America, to Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen's, to Johan Bojer's and Sigrid Undseťs and Herman Wildenvey 's, and, not least, to Knut Hamsun's, but none of these are as poignant and, in a sense, as tragic as those of Sigbj0rn Obstfelder. In his relationship to the American scene, Obstfelder presents a unique case. Obstfelder interlarded his Norwegian-language letters to his brother with occasional English expressions, sometimes whole sentences, and in one instance a whole page. These have been retained as written, and all have been italicized. Even though on a few occasions 254 SIGBJ0RN OBSTFELDER AND AMERICA Obstfelder's English appears a bit shaky, his intent is clear and so no emendations or explanations have been made. In some cases Obstfelder italicized a Norwegian word, which has been indicated. Occasionally Obstfelder Norwegianized an American word, e.g., drafts msend . These instances have been treated as follows: "There are fewer draftsmen ( draftsmdend ) than at Wise. B. & I. Co." Obstfelder's letters were never dated, so the date that appears above each letter is that of the postmark . The flavor of Obstfelder's language has been faithfully retained, but his mechanics have been somewhat altered. This is especially true of his abundant use of the dash, some instances of which have been eliminated from this version. His ubiquitous use of the dash is certainly indicative of a teeming brain, with a staccato outpouring of ideas and notions. This use of the dash has been retained, but where the intent and the meaning are not obscured by omission of a dash, it has been left out. At his best, Obstfelder could be witty; he did not disdain slang or mild profanity or the earthy...

Dark Decade: The Declining Years of Waldemar Ager

by CLARENCE KILDE 7 Dark Decade: The Declining Years of Waldemar Ager Life sitively is ultimately cruel. This tragic has become and the the world conclusion is insensitively cruel. This has become the conclusion about the nature of life as depicted in immigrant literature . Whatever the race or nationality, to emigrate, to forsake one's native land forever, to experience permanent family separation, to part forever with friends, to desert ancestral firesides - this became an undertaking with uncertain consequences, including the peril of tragic failure. And the heavy heart of the emigrant often became "the divided heart" of the immigrant. The self was suspended in the tension between nostalgia over the past and anxiety concerning the future. How did the self endure this tension with its contrasting temptations - to homesickness or to horizons of hope? There were a few independent souls who abandoned America and returned to their homeland. Such was the case of the Norwegian immigrant author Kristofer Janson , in Minneapolis, and his young friend, Knut Hamsun , who dreamed of becoming a writer. There were also those who lacked the spirit of independence, those in bondage to inadequacy, who sought sólace in dreaming 157 Clarence Kilde over the past and who died of unspeakable loneliness and lie buried, often in unmarked graves, their only monument the fictional characters in immigrant novels. But the immigrant who neither returned to his native land nor died prematurely from lost dreams and a broken heart was the determinedly practical person. He drowned his thoughts of the past in deeds of vigorous action, having a relatively well-defined purpose and pursuing it with high and sustained courage. Immigration statistics tell us that most Norwegians came to the Midwest to plow and plant the fields; some planned and started small businesses; a very few seized the pen, giving a measure of meaning to the immigrant's life and setting worthy goals and purposes for his being assimilated into a new society. In this latter and smallest group of single-minded, purposeful activists was Waldemar Theodore Ager who came to America in 1885. He did not write with a pen, however, but with an endless number of pencils across nearly two score years as editor of the Norwegianlanguage weekly newspaper Reform in Eau Claire, Wisconsin . At the same time, he was author of six novels, eight collections of short stories and essays, and one historical narrative. A significant symbol of the compulsory thrift that marked the life of one publishing a newspaper and books in a foreign language, while providing for a family of nine children, was a legacy of Ball and Mason glass fruit-canning jars full of one-inch pencil stubs, their sharp points shaved with a pocket jackknife. The graphite of these No. 2.5 pencils communicated Ager's cardinal convictions upon the blank sides of scrap paper, printing-press spoilages in all shapes and sizes forever lying about in a job-printing shop. In his frugality he also used the blank sides of circulars that came third class in the mail. His abiding legacy, however, is the total corpus of 158 DECLINING YEARS OF WALDEMAR AGER writings during a half-century: the complete file of Reform , his collected short stories and poems, his essays and novels, his perceptive articles of literary criticism, and the unforgettable character of the person that emerges from these writings. The stature of the man as literary artist has been favorably judged by Einar Haugen: "In originality and talent he stands far above all who have produced in Norwegian-American literature, with the exception of Rplvaag." 1 And Ole E. Rplvaag himself, beginning in 1910, often praised his ability. In a letter to a friend shortly after the publication that year of Ager's first successful novel, Kristus for Pilatus (Christ before Pilate), Rplvaag said: "Artistically speaking, Waldemar Ager has reached a peak which it will be difficult for the rest of us to attain."2 This novel deserves initial attention for two reasons. In the half-century of Norwegian immigrant writing, from Gunnar by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen in 1874 to Rplvaag 's publication of Giants in the Earth in the original Norwegian in 1924 (I de...

The plays of Knut Hamsun

The plays of Knut Hamsun

Singer and the TraditionIsaac Bashevis Singer and the Eternal Past. Irving H. Buchen

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsSinger and the Tradition Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Eternal Past. Irving H. Buchen Melvin J. JriedmanMelvin J. Jriedman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 49, Number 4Oct., 1969 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/486195 Views: 5Total views on this site Copyright 1969 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Knut Hamsun's America

by ARLOW W. ANDERSEN 7 Knut Hamsun 's America IN came the to 1880's America. a young European Norwegian writers of had great been promise sendcame to America. European writers had been sending their heroes and heroines abroad to realize their ambitions for a more expansive life, as Henrik Ibsen did with Lona Hessel in Pillars of Society . In the words of Hanna Astrup Larsen, whose analysis of Knut Hamsun's literary works appeared some forty years ago, Hamsun came not merely as an immigrant seeking his fortune. He sought opportunities for leading an independent existence and using his gifts. Having bruised himself on Old World littleness, he looked to the New World for bigger visions and for a saner estimate of a man's worth. Although he was destined to be disappointed, some of the things he sought were there.1 In 1920 Knut Hamsun was to receive the Nobel prize for literature. He produced many novels but left no memoirs. Fortunately, his son Tore has provided a remarkably complete account, in Norwegian, of his father. If a man's achievements are in large measure the outcome of his childhood ambitions and experiences, Knut Hamsun may well serve as an example. Originally called Knut Pedersen Hamsund, he was born August 4, 1859, into a tailor's family in Garmostrœet, district of 1 Hanna Astrup Larsen, Knut Hamsun , 20 (New York, 1922) . 176 Arlow W . Andersen Vaagaa, Gudbrandsdal. When he was about three the family moved northward to a gaard (farming estate) called Hamsund , in Hamar0y in Nordland, not far from the Lofoten Islands . The islands and the fisheries did not interest him, but he loved the woods and the mountains. At the age of nine he was sent away for five years, like a medieval apprentice, to the home of his maternal uncle, Hans Olsen. There he worked in a store and did odd jobs. It was a hard and trying period for the boy, living under the strict discipline of an eccentric relative.2 Young Hamsun remembered well a nation-wide revival that eventually reached Nordland. Leading the drive for souls was Pastor Lars Oftedal of Stavanger, depicted by some as a bearded champion from Yestlandet (the West Country) . Hans Olsen was gripped, and Knut became the object of his concern. In an issue of Dagbladet (Christiania) , of 1889, the year before Hans Olsen died, Hamsun expressed his disdain for Oftedal, for his uncle, and for the spirit that they personified . He felt that his childhood had been blighted by their influence. Knut finally fled to his native community in Gudbrandsdal , where he worked in a store for a year and was confirmed in the Lutheran faith. He never was reconciled with his uncle. He learned to grit his teeth, says his son, a lesson that was to be useful in the coming years.3 Now about fifteen years of age, Hamsun made his way back to the family home in Hamar0y, where for the next five years, 1874-79, he had various jobs and assisted the local lensmand (sheriff) . He also had the opportunity to do a bit of teaching. In the sheriff's home he encountered the works of Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson, Kristofer Janson, and others, and did not squander 2 Tore Hamsun, Knut Hamsun , 7-24 (Oslo, 1959) . See also Theodore Jorgenson , History of Norwegian Literature , 390 (New York, 1933); Larsen, Knut Hamsun , 12-15. The name of Christiania was changed to Oslo on January 1, 1925. 3 Tore Hamsun, Knut Hamsun , 24-40. Lars Oftedal founded Stavanger Aftenblad , a low-church journal, in 1893. In 1891 he had lost his position as a statechurch pastor; Per Thomsen, "Lars Oftedal," in Bernt Hjejle and Hâkon Stangerup , eds., Store norske journalister , 40-47 (Copenhagen, 1957) ; Per Thomsen, present editor of Stavanger Aftenbladt to the author, February 20, 1964. 176 KNUT HAMSUN'S AMERICA this opportunity to read. Nor was young Hamsun content until three of his minor romantic stories were accepted by printers in Troms0 and Bod0.4 With financial assistance from a wealthy merchant in Hamaly , Knut next went southward to Hardanger. There he changed his name to Pedersen, which he thought more...

The Square Root of Ibsen

THE SQUARE ROOT OF mSEN THE ESSENCE OF IBSEN is elusive and indefinable, and even more so the quintessence of Ibsen; but the square root is quite another thing. Because it is simultaneously plus and minus, it resolves all disparate elements in a profound and empirically acceptable ambiguity. So thinks J. W. McFarlane, Professor of Scandinavian at the University of Durham in Newcastle, and if ever a man had the opportunity to discover the square root of Ibsen it is Professor McFarlane, who is translating and editing the Oxford Ibsen, the first scholarly edition of a Scandinavian author to appear in English in our time or any time. Professor McFarlane approaches Ibsen with a rich knowledge of Norwegian backgrounds, as is evidenced by his critical volume, Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian Literature, which immediately preceded volumes V and VI of the Oxford Ibsen, the only two volumes yet available.1 Rather than make a firm line of demarcation between the two projects, I should prefer to consider first McFarlane the critic, wherever the criticism may appear, and then McFarlane the editor/ translator. Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian Literature is a misnomer, thanks to the publisher I suspect, and not to the author. Ibsen's name sells a book these days, but not so with Knut Hamsun. Mr. McFarlane's best essay, by all odds, is that on Hamsun. It was admired when it first appeared in PMLA a few years back, and in its revised condition it reads even better. Mr. McFarlane conducts the standard literary survey with breadth, urbanity, and ease. He solicits the optimal infusion of biography and evaluates the canon with balance and authority. This skill is demonstrated throughout the volume, but most crisply in the Hamsun essay. On the continent it is easy enough and customary to publish a volume of occasional literary essays under some such· title as Views and Opinions, Literary Studies, Norwegian Writing: Views and Reviews , or Hamsun and Other Norwegians, for example. You pick it. The desultory, but no less serious, reader will learn a great deal about Norwegian literature from just such a volume as this one, if he does not trouble himself looking for the implied thread. Mr. McFarlane is entirely modest in his disclaimer, by the way. "There is no suggestion ," he writes, "that these separate essays could by any kind 1. Ibsen and the TBmfJ8f' of Norwegian Literature, London: Oxford University Press, 1960, 208 pp., 21 sbillings; Ibsen Vol. V. PiUars of Society, A Doll's Howe, Ghosts, London: Oxford University Press, 1961,499 PP.I $7.00; Ibsen Vol. VI. An Enemy of the People, The W.'ld Duck, R08m8f'sholm, London: Oxfol'l1 University Press, 1960, 464 pp., $5.75; New York: Oxfol'l1 University Press (Hesperides Book), 1961, paper $2.25. 431 432 MODERN DRAMA February of arithmetic add up to literary history." Now Mr. McFarlane, I suspect, loves arithmetic almost as much as he does literature, but he is intent upon the touchstones and especially those that have meaning to an English speaking and reading audience. Norwegians have been shocked, for example, that Anglo-American audiences are "insulated against the spell" of BjfIJmstjerne BjfIJrnson, and even more by the opinion that his works are "too deeply riven by serious flaws of taste, of artistry, of structural design"; but it is a sober judgment that finds acceptance elsewhere. The essays on Wergeland, Jonas Lie, Kielland, Obstfelder, and Undset are also informed and authoritative. Discussion of the literature of Nynorsk, the somewhat synthetic Norwegian built upon dialectal foundations, is sketchy; and, in general, poetry is hardly treated at all on grounds of the "paucity of translated lyric." Such playwrights as Gunnar Heiberg, Helge Krog, and Nordahl Greig are omitted, however much they may characterize the temper of Norwegian literature. Dramatic criticism largely resides in the chapters on Holberg, included because he was Norwegian born, and Ibsen; and it is disquieting. To McFarlane, tragedy and comedy differ as between a "plumping out or paring down," an expression which has something to do with the way ideas are spatialized in the play. Comedy dissatisfies him generally, because "exemplary ideals can rarely be successfully objectified or personified...