Norwegian Writer Research Articles

وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي والرأي العام في مجتمع تقوده الرأسمالية: دراسة لمسرحية إبسن (عدو الشعب)

The goal of this paper is to shed light on the effect of social media in shaping public opinion in communities that are ruled by capitalists, as represented by the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen in his “An Enemy of the People.” Through a profound reading of the play, this paper aims to reflect how those who have different opinions from those of the authorities are liable to persecution and oppression. The paper also investigates the ways through which the capitalists manipulate power and authority to shape public opinion through press/ social media to serve their purposes and interests. The present study concludes that capitalism exerts an obvious effect on people and reflects that the majority’s opinion is so absolute to the extent that any other opinion is intolerable. It also shows that people are affected by the capitalist nature of the society. Public opinions are manufactured according to the consent of the majority in the society. Social media plays a major role in creating opinions and nurturing them. Instead of being an altruistic, positive force, social media exposes itself as an authority purveyor of lies. It functions as a full-time patrol to persuade the people to succumb to the majority as the only refuge for a peaceful life. Therefore, any hope for a dignified life in a community where individual freedom and individuality are respected becomes a far-fetched pursuit.

STORIES OF A COLLAPSING FUTURE. REPRESENTATIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECTS IN MAJA LUNDE’S NOVELS

The article proposes an overview of two novels written by the Norwegian writer Maja Lunde, through notions such as ‘dystopia’, ‘trans-corporeality’ (Alaimo 2018) and `heterotopy’ (Foucault 1984) that showcase the presence of various beings and spaces interlinked and existing in a constantly changing environment. The History of Bees gathers three stories from separate timelines in order to emphasize the evolution of the relation between people and the environment, while The End of the Ocean tackles problems of desertification and dreadful effects of the capitalist system. Both books are essential for understanding a new type of catastrophe, which has been explained as a “catastrophe without event” (Horn 2014), due to its graduality that is a result of climate transformations generated by various industries and people’s harmful attitudes towards their natural surroundings. Memory and objects are also central coordinates in analysing how the future actualizes the past, since the characters rest their survival on a book (The History of Bees) and on a boat (The End of the Ocean). Moreover, Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopy’ is illustrative of the liminal state in which the protagonists exist. The catastrophic spatiality encapsulates trauma, the will to transgress time, and the absence of the beloved ones. Survival is the narrative thread that opens the communication between different generations, and loneliness or death are pivotal elements for recreating the present, which, in Lunde’s novels, is seen as unfavourable, but nevertheless having ingrained a sense of hope for the future.

“that which is common to us all”: Karl Ove Knausgaard as Reader of Joyce

In his monumental autobiographical series of novels My Struggle, acclaimed Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard devotes a considerable number of pages to discuss James Joyce’s fictional works. In the last volume of the series – The End –, practically the entire body of Joyce’s fiction – from early works such as Stephen Hero and Dubliners to the modernist masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – is included in a discussion on the Irish novelist’s literature. Only one among Joyce’s major works is not tackled by Knausgaard in The End: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Nonetheless, it is precisely Knausgaard who writes the preface to a celebrated Centennial edition of Joyce’s first novel in which, amidst other topics, he ponders over what he understands to be “the very essence of literature.” The article aims at highlighting some key aspects of Knausgaard’s take on Joyce’s fictional output and provide enough evidence to support the hypothesis that the Norwegian writer’s conceptualization of the literary phenomenon, including Joyce’s work, is based upon questionable essentialist premises.

A modernist meeting in Montparnasse: precarity and freedom in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Cora Sandel’s Alberta and Freedom

ABSTRACT When Jean Rhys was living in Paris in the years between 1918 and 1921 it is entirely likely that she at least saw the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel in the Dome café or elsewhere around Montparnasse, at Sylvia Beach's book store, or on the streets that form a character in both writers' Paris novels. Sandel, who was ten years older than Rhys, lived in Montparnasse between 1906 and 1921. Within just a few years of one another these two writers published achingly similar portraits of displaced women living in Paris among various cohorts of other foreigners. In gestures that decenter both the European hegemony that Rhys so resented and what Sandel saw as suffocating Nordic provincialism, both writers present a de-nationalized Paris that affords their characters certain radical freedoms while at the same time grinding them down economically and psychologically. This essay examines the precarity of the freedom that Sandel explores in Alberte og friheten (1931) [Alberta and Freedom] and the glimpses of rebellious freedom expressed in Rhys's portrait of precarity, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), as they mutually illuminate one another.

Evil Flowers: Stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Reviewed by: Evil Flowers: Stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug Lanie Tankard GUNNHILD ØYEHAUG Evil Flowers: Stories Trans. Kari Dickson. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 128 pages. NORWEGIAN WRITER Gunnhild Øyehaug plumbs her psyche in a newly translated work, putting a twenty-first-century spin on nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The compelling result teems with candor, wit, anxious obsession, and the merest touch of schadenfreude—or what Baudelaire might have termed joie malicieuse. As in her earlier collection of stories, Wait, Blink (see WLT, July 2018), Øyehaug again explores inner life. The opening presentation, "Birds," doesn't waste any time. In the very first sentence, a large chunk of an ornithologist's brain falls into the toilet as she's preparing to defend her PhD thesis. Oh, her mind still works, except she's forgotten everything about birds—can't even recognize one. Seeking refuge at her parents' house, memories emerge, coalescing into twenty-four short tales. Øyehaug shakes crumbs out of the pockets of her mind, wringing them for all they're worth to repel their power over her. Pieces range from one to eleven pages, plus two of notes. A wordless one-pager, "A Bit Like This," is a sole black-and-white photo—that of Baudelaire glaring at the preceding title story, "Evil Flowers." Øyehaug stares him down in the succeeding "Protest" by calling on American writer Richard Brautigan. She says Baudelaire's greatest poem is "The Swan" (Le Cygne), whose lines perhaps echo her own theme here: "dear memories … heavier than rocks" by "those who've lost what they cannot recover." Her narrations delve into the loss of a mother as well as past loves. Whereas Baudelaire engaged with Victor Hugo in "Le Cygne" or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in "Le Calumet de Paix," Øyehaug nods to, say, Virginia Woolf or Henrik Ibsen. In one plot, she sets up an imaginative excursion to Monk's House, the Woolf cottage in East Sussex, without ever actually venturing there. "The Nordics Seen from the Outside" ponders the cold blue hues typically used to depict Nordic and Scandinavian countries on maps. The essay becomes a thought-provoking rumination on how those populations see themselves as well as how the rest of the world might view them, based on pictorial color selection alone. Hmm, what if they were portrayed in a warmer pink, she wonders, examining herself in the context of her society. When contemplations occasionally float off-course in various streams of consciousness, she steadfastly recenters her craft, murmuring, "I'll soon get to the point" or "but back to the subject." She's reminiscent there of others who don't always follow a pattern: Polish Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk talking to herself (as in Flights) or Croatian author Daša Drndić (as in Belladonna). In one account, Øyehaug notices a growing tendency to disguise guns as "cell pistols." Such smartphone protection cases appear harmless yet can actually perform as guns. Then she digresses charmingly into ornamental grass, hosta plants, and bocce balls. An older woman in "The Thread" dreams from her hospital bed about her daughter in Denmark, recalling how she took umbrage at her name as a child and its connection to "wicked Queen Gunnhild," lamenting she wasn't named after "a good queen." Gunnhild Øyehaug expects readers to defamiliarize themselves with traditional literary shapes and risk charting new territory with her in Evil Flowers. As Baudelaire wrote in "I" at his journey's end: "We've been around the world; and this is our report." [End Page 75] Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Nora’s Transformation as a Self Esteemed Woman - Detailed Study of Character Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Gender and sexuality are two important forces that shape every aspect of life. Gender determines the differences in power and control in which men and women have over the socio economic determinants of their health, lives and status in their community. Henrik Ibsen who was famously known as “Father of Realism” and “Father of Modern Drama” transparently portrayed the emancipation of the individual, especially of women in his play A Doll’s House. This paper aims to cast light on the unpretentious character called NORA from A Doll’s House, a three act play written by Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen. Initially it was written in Danish and later translated as A Doll’s House. This play is set in a Norwegian town called Circa in 1879. A deep dive has been done on the play notably on Nora’s character.

Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn'sIbsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Worksand Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn's<i>Ibsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Works</i>and Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

Desire-Aware Translation: From Ethics to Erotics

Desire-Aware Translation:From Ethics to Erotics David M. Smith (bio) I In Clayton Eshleman's "A Translation Memoir," an afterword to his translations of César Vallejo, we find an extraordinary account of the role desire played in one man's life as a translator. "For nearly 50 years," Eshleman wrote, Vallejo "has become the keelson in the ship of poetry I have attempted to construct." As a college student and aspiring poet in the early sixties, Eshleman came to translation because he thought translating poetry might facilitate the writing of his own poems. This aim would be radically disrupted when he discovered Vallejo, however, in whom he found "a whole wailing cathedral of desires, half-desires, mad-desires, anti-desires, all of which … seemed caught on the edge of no-desire." Eshleman decided he had to try and translate Vallejo's Poemas humanos, a project he approached with some trepidation, as it would involve "an awesome commitment of psyche as well as time." His anxiety would prove to be well-founded: Both in translating and in working on my own poems, I felt a terrific resistance, as if every attempt I made to advance was met by a force that pushed me back. It was as if through Vallejo I had made contact with a negative impaction in my being, a nebulous depth charge that I had been carrying around with me for many years. … I also began to have violent and morbid fantasies that seemed provoked by the combination of translating and writing. More and more I felt that I was struggling with a man as well as a text, and that this struggle was a matter of my becoming or failing to become a poet. For Eshleman, this translation brought about nothing less than the dissolution—the death—of his old identity. Out rose a new way of being: "I envisioned myself as a kind of angel-less Jacob wrestling with a figure who possessed a language the meaning of which I was attempting to wrest away." This did not only mean he was wrestling with Vallejo to wrench away the meaning of the poems; rather, Eshleman also came to realize: I had ceased to be what I was … that I now had a glimpse of another life, a life I was to create for myself, and that this other man I was struggling with was also the old Clayton who was resisting change. The old Clayton wanted to continue living in his white Presbyterian world of "light"—where man is associated with day/clarity/good and woman with night/opaqueness/bad. The darkness that was [End Page 157] beginning to spread through my sensibility could be viewed as the breaking up of the belief in male supremacy that had generated much of that "light." Eshleman's statement is radically different from most translators' prefaces and afterwords. Typically, these statements start with respectful deference to previous translations, before announcing why a new translation is needed or justified. The stability of the translator's identity, and their ability to transparently render the original author's meaning, is rarely questioned. Eshleman, however, shows us with wrenching honesty how the translator can be radically transformed by the experience, by opening the self to the translation as fully as possible. I am moved by Eshleman's honesty, and at times have been tempted to write, if not a full autobiography of my own coming-to-be as a translator, then a similar account of the desires, the resistances that have shaped my identity as a translator and my translational practice thus far. I take as a starting point my translation of the short story that complements this essay: "Den slappe farskapsdingsen," or in my rendering, "The Limp Fatherpizzle," by the Norwegian writer Kristian Klausen. I say "complements" since neither translation nor essay should be read either as prior or subordinate to the other. Rather, translation and essay become two sides of the same project of working through, in the psychoanalytic sense, of working through resistances in order to free up my translational desire. Through this analytical work, I hope to move away from certain distorting tendencies inherent to translation as...

Health Through the Space Lens

The article discusses cultural perceptions and interpretations of health and illness in a Svalbard context through the analysis of the novels Longyearbyen (2020) by the Norwegian writer Heidi Sævareid and The Arctic Novel (1964) by the Soviet writer Vladlen Anchishkin. Both novels use Svalbard of the 1950s as a setting for portraying issues related to health and illness.&#x0D; It is evident from the analyses that issues related to health and illness were essential in both Norwegian and Russian settlements on Svalbard in the 1950s. Many of the same diseases and incidents, such as mining injuries, hypothermia and appendicitis, are prevalent in both novels. An interesting difference is that The Arctic Novel does not contain references to psychiatric diseases, even though they were presumably relevant for the inhabitants on Svalbard, irrespectively of their geographical provenance and social background.&#x0D; One of the overarching themes that arises from these texts, is how the spatial setting directly affects health and illness. Living on Svalbard has clear effects for the health and well-being of the main characters in both novels. Another fundamental theme is how individuals fit into a larger context. These themes are important also today, when discussing for instance access to health care in remote areas (such as Svalbard), or when exploring the international presence on Svalbard from a geopolitical perspective.

TIME AS A COGNITIVE DOMINANT IN FORMATTING THE POINT OF VIEW IN JOSTEIN GAARDER’S FICTION

The article is about the bestseller of the Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder’s novel “The Orange Girl” and tells about intertextual searches in Gaarder's work. Emphasizes the writer's ability: to speak lightly, even a little naively, and in an interesting way about the most difficult, to "understand" the reader in interacting with himself, which is the most important of the many possibilities that literature offers. At the same time, it is no coincidence that the genre of Jostein Gaarder’s “The Orange Girl” is supplemented and defined as the mystery novel.

Storyteller, Stenographer, and Self‑Published Superstar

Astrid Lindgren holds a unique position within world literature, yet her enigmatic creative process has for many years been hidden in her impenetrable stenographed drafts and manuscripts. Because Lindgren through her employment at publishing house Rabén & Sjögren acted as her own editor and publisher, these drafts contain the entire creative and editorial – and to date inaccessible – process behind her literary works. With the purpose of unmasking Lindgren’s creative process as visible in her shorthand drafts and typed up manuscripts, this article applies the perspective of sociological editing (shaped particularly by McGann (1983) and McKenzie (1986) and more recently developed and applied for text genetic purposes by for example van Hulle (2008; 2014) and Gabler (2018)) to early results from The Astrid Lindgren Code. Focal points are 1) the secretarial skill of shorthand as the engine in Lindgren’s creative process, and its function in the interplay between the different production roles assumed by Lindgren 2) how the inaccessibility of her manuscripts, as well as the fact that Lindgren as author, editor, and publisher was her own ‘collaborator’ has contributed to reproducing an image of Lindgren as a solitary literary genius, or with Norwegian writer Alf Prøysen’s words, “a solar system of her own”.

"ЛЮДИ ОДНОЙ ПОРОДЫ": ЧТО ЗНАЧИЛА СИГРИД УНСЕТ ДЛЯ МАРИНЫ ЦВЕТАЕВОЙ

Analysis of Marina Tsvetaeva’s statements in her letters, diaries, memoirs of her contemporaries as well as a biography and works of a Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset (Nobel prize, 1928) proves that both authors, despite all national, cultural differences, were people of “the same kind”, “the same breed” (Tsvetaeva), they were marked with the same seal - genius and karmic tragedy. In 1930, being in France, Tsvetaeva read (in German translation) Undset’s epic trilogy “Kristin, Lavransdaughter” (1920-1922) which became “her favourite book” for life. Tsvetaeva’s attitude towards Undset reveals her attitude to literature as an existential sphere of human experience, as a saving source of life.

“Faustian Theme” in Slavic Literary Monuments: Problematics of Motives

The issue of conceptual correlation of Slavic stories about Savva Grudtsyn and Pan Tvardovsky with the concepts of “Faustian theme”, “Faustian legend” and “Faustian story” is considered. The question is raised about the legitimacy of referring the Slavic variants of the motive of the contract with the devil to the general group of similar motives by analogy with the “Faustian” one. A review of domestic and foreign scientific literature devoted to the difference and similarity of Slavic plots with the legend of Faust, as well as common sources and typological characteristics of the features of the “Faustian theme” is carried out. The results of a comparative analysis of texts about Faust, Savva Grudtsyn and Pan Tvardovsky are presented. Special attention is paid to the comparison of the anonymous work about Savva Grudtsyn with the novel by the Norwegian writer M. K. Hansen. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that for solve this problem a systematic literary methodology is proposed in the key of historical poetics, based on the differentiation of the analysis of plots, motives, the system of characters and semantic accents of works. The relevance of the study is due to the introduction into scientific circulation of previously poorly studied texts of literature and folklore, in which the plot of a contract with a demon is seen. The definitions of specific motives are given, which make it possible to differentiate literary monuments according to the principle of a plot model and a system of characters. The author's development in relation to the sources of the specified plot type is presented.

Everything Like Before by Kjell Askildsen

BOOKS IN REVIEW Kjell Askildsen Everything Like Before Trans. Seán Kinsella. New York. Archipelago Books. 2021. 275 pages. “I LIVE IN A basement; a result of having come down in the world, in every sense.” So begins “A Sudden Liberating Thought,” one of thirty-seven stories that comprise Everything Like Before, Norwegian writer Kjell Askilden’s newest collection of fiction , which typifies his darkly ironic take on the absurd. Askilden’s characters tend to experience spiritual injury in the form of an amorphous stab from the distant past, unknowable and condemning, that is brought into the present through an almost arbitrary impetus: the page number of a book, opening a second bottle of wine, or sharing a park bench with a stranger. In the aforementioned story, an unnamed narrator’s peaceful walk through the park is interrupted by a stranger who seemstomirrorthenarrator’sownthoughts and actions. Only later is it revealed that the stranger is actually a judge and the narrator a convicted criminal from an age-old court case. Both crime and punishment are blurred by lack of detail, so this insight provides no resolution and instead preserves his life in the basement. Askilden’s interest in the condemned is further developed in “I’m not like this, I’m not like this.” While visiting his disabled sister, the dutiful narrator befriends her elderly neighbor, a man who appears strikingly familiar but is ultimately unplaceable. It takes another family member to recognize the man as an infamous convicted murderer from years before. This man later confides in the narrator about his anxiety, only to self-interrupt by politely asking if he is being a bother. The narrator exits in a flurry of silent confusion; meanwhile violence and punishment, lodged so far in the past as to be almost prehistoric, obscure the tortured condition of this man’s soul. Resolution cannot be realized without first pinpointing the origin of conflict, and that is not within the remit of Askilden’s fiction. Despite the dark subject matter, the stories make for bracing reading due to Askilden’s spare prose and the sly humor that arrives unexpectedly in the middle of a character’s downfall. One character’s bender is thus punctuated with a line such as “He drank, and it grew dark, and he got on well with himself,” and an old man at the park idly ponders, “If for some reason an airplane were to explode in the sky, I wouldn’t mind being one of the people— preferably the only one—who witnessed it.” Such rueful quips abound throughout this collection and lend a refreshing lightness to Askilden’s bleak vision of the absurd. Phillip Garland St. Louis, Missouri Yamen Manai The Ardent Swarm Trans. Lara Vergnaud. Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2021. 204 pages. COMMITTED TO KEEPING Tunisian works available in Tunisia, Yamen Manai has hitherto published with Éditions Elyzad. Now, Amazon Crossing and award-winning translator Lara Vergnaud have brought The Ardent Swarm from the French into English, and we can only hope that Manai’s other novels will follow. Opening with “The Bee” from the Quran, The Ardent Swarm takes place in the fictional mountain village of Nawa, North Africa. We meet and quickly fall in love with the humble Sidi, a beekeeper devoted to the safety and prosperity of “his girls,” the honeybee hive he has grown and lovingly tends. A foreign threat has appeared, however. Unknown to importers , an aggressive species of hornets has stowed away in their cargo, goods that provide the link to the other component of Manai’s story. The country is in transition with its first democratic election on the horizon. Soldiers patrol the road from Nawa as the villagers make their way to the city to sell their meager harvest. A party of fundamentalists comes to solicit votes from the people, who would be wise to “beware Greeks bearing gifts.” The campaigners arrive with cargo crates full of food, blankets , and other luxuries as a preview of their platform and tell the people to simply “vote for the Pigeon on the ballot,” since most of the Nawa residents are unable to read and write. Shaw’s Major Barbara comes to mind...

The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai

BOOKS IN REVIEW Kjell Askildsen Everything Like Before Trans. Seán Kinsella. New York. Archipelago Books. 2021. 275 pages. “I LIVE IN A basement; a result of having come down in the world, in every sense.” So begins “A Sudden Liberating Thought,” one of thirty-seven stories that comprise Everything Like Before, Norwegian writer Kjell Askilden’s newest collection of fiction , which typifies his darkly ironic take on the absurd. Askilden’s characters tend to experience spiritual injury in the form of an amorphous stab from the distant past, unknowable and condemning, that is brought into the present through an almost arbitrary impetus: the page number of a book, opening a second bottle of wine, or sharing a park bench with a stranger. In the aforementioned story, an unnamed narrator’s peaceful walk through the park is interrupted by a stranger who seemstomirrorthenarrator’sownthoughts and actions. Only later is it revealed that the stranger is actually a judge and the narrator a convicted criminal from an age-old court case. Both crime and punishment are blurred by lack of detail, so this insight provides no resolution and instead preserves his life in the basement. Askilden’s interest in the condemned is further developed in “I’m not like this, I’m not like this.” While visiting his disabled sister, the dutiful narrator befriends her elderly neighbor, a man who appears strikingly familiar but is ultimately unplaceable. It takes another family member to recognize the man as an infamous convicted murderer from years before. This man later confides in the narrator about his anxiety, only to self-interrupt by politely asking if he is being a bother. The narrator exits in a flurry of silent confusion; meanwhile violence and punishment, lodged so far in the past as to be almost prehistoric, obscure the tortured condition of this man’s soul. Resolution cannot be realized without first pinpointing the origin of conflict, and that is not within the remit of Askilden’s fiction. Despite the dark subject matter, the stories make for bracing reading due to Askilden’s spare prose and the sly humor that arrives unexpectedly in the middle of a character’s downfall. One character’s bender is thus punctuated with a line such as “He drank, and it grew dark, and he got on well with himself,” and an old man at the park idly ponders, “If for some reason an airplane were to explode in the sky, I wouldn’t mind being one of the people— preferably the only one—who witnessed it.” Such rueful quips abound throughout this collection and lend a refreshing lightness to Askilden’s bleak vision of the absurd. Phillip Garland St. Louis, Missouri Yamen Manai The Ardent Swarm Trans. Lara Vergnaud. Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2021. 204 pages. COMMITTED TO KEEPING Tunisian works available in Tunisia, Yamen Manai has hitherto published with Éditions Elyzad. Now, Amazon Crossing and award-winning translator Lara Vergnaud have brought The Ardent Swarm from the French into English, and we can only hope that Manai’s other novels will follow. Opening with “The Bee” from the Quran, The Ardent Swarm takes place in the fictional mountain village of Nawa, North Africa. We meet and quickly fall in love with the humble Sidi, a beekeeper devoted to the safety and prosperity of “his girls,” the honeybee hive he has grown and lovingly tends. A foreign threat has appeared, however. Unknown to importers , an aggressive species of hornets has stowed away in their cargo, goods that provide the link to the other component of Manai’s story. The country is in transition with its first democratic election on the horizon. Soldiers patrol the road from Nawa as the villagers make their way to the city to sell their meager harvest. A party of fundamentalists comes to solicit votes from the people, who would be wise to “beware Greeks bearing gifts.” The campaigners arrive with cargo crates full of food, blankets , and other luxuries as a preview of their platform and tell the people to simply “vote for the Pigeon on the ballot,” since most of the Nawa residents are unable to read and write. Shaw’s Major Barbara comes to mind...

The sense of space and Arctic nature in Cora Sandel’s Kranes konditori: interiør med figurer (Krane’s Café: An Interior with Figures)

The paper combines the close reading technique of the novel Kranes konditori: Interiør med figurer (Krane’s Café: An Interior with Figures, 1946), written by the classic Norwegian writer Cora Sandel (1880-1974) with a spatial approach which aims to present the past and the present of the novel’s main character, Katinka Stordal. The action takes place in a small town situated in northern Norway, at Krane’s Café. It is worth noting how topography, the seasons of the year, the Arctic climate and nature are gradually reflected in the novel. On the one hand, the novel is placed at the crossroads of a spatial perspective and the literary criticism, which has in its centre Krane’s Café, the place where almost all the characters are brought together and which is the most suggestive and representative interior space of the novel. On the other hand, the subtitle An Interior with Figures strengthens the idea of a mixture of literary genres which includes elements from novel and drama. Moreover, it resembles the title of a work of art, for instance, a painting where all the characters are simply figures animated by the beauty of the Arctic scenery.

Climate Change in Literature, Television and Film from Norway

Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers’ Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical aspects, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such aspects: (1) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels); (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, and thus of what often is seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) notions of “Nordicity”, and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works (which often has been ascribed to Nordic landscapes, and usually is characteristic for the genre of Nordic noir).

Кнут Гамсун в Сибири

The article is devoted to various forms of Hamsun’s influence on Siberian writers of the 1910–1930s. On the pages of Siberian periodicals, the Norwegian writer was often mentioned in theatrical chronicle, in the lists of European book novelties, in poetic texts, but he influenced most clearly the general northern flavour of the Siberian prose. Fifteen stories and short novellas of famous Siberian writers (Georgy Grebenshchikov, Isaak Goldberg, Anton Sorokin, Georgy Vyatkin) and almost forgotten writers (Stepan Isakov, Arseny Zhilyakov, Maximilian Kravkov) form the “Siberian Hamsuniana”, the distinctive features of which are “anti-urbanism”, “ethnography”, folklorism, northern landscapes and scenes of folk life. When studying the texts that became the subject of description in this article, the materials from an archive of the Siberian literature historian and critic N. N. Yanovsky were used, who collected and printed a book of short stories by S. Isakov and A. Zhilyakov in the mid-1980s with an introductory article, which sets out biographies of forgotten writers. In the introductory article to this book, it is mentioned that literary comrades called Stepan Isakov half-jokingly to be the “Siberian Hamsun”. When analyzing the Siberian prose on Hamsun themes, special attention was paid to the stylization elements of northern mythology, shamanistic predictions, various legends, which creates an image of Siberia similar to the image of northern Europe by Hamsun.

Katja OskampMarzahn, mon amour

out onto the landing. I pull the boat in and then carefully put the pitchfork in the front of the boat. Fosse brings the same passion and the same commitment to his characters into the first two volumes of The Other Name. There is virtually no plot. Style is more important than story. As the title suggests, there appear to be characters who share a name. The novels drown in doppelgängers. The primary one is Asle, a widower (his wife’s name was Asles—this is not the last time that names look alike) and painter living alone in the village of Dylgja. He has infrequent contact with a nearby neighbor, Asleik, from whom he gets lutefisk and lamb ribs. Asle gives Asleik paintings to gift to his sister, Guro, perhaps as penance for what might have been a presumed affair. Another Asle (call him Asle 2), also a painter, lives thirty miles south of Dylgja, in the city of Bjorgvin. Over the two days of the two-part volume, Asle 1 travels back and forth between both sites in order to deliver some of his paintings to the Beyer Gallery. During his trips, he reflects on past events, some of which may be real memories and some of which may be imagined. Three provocative sequences include seductive images on a swing, a seesaw, and in a sandpit. There is a lyricism to the prose at the same time that it has a sexual connotation. One “grown-up child” pushes another higher and higher until she/Asles is “soaring and moving, hanging in the air,” then he/Asle 1 pummels her into the ground until their heartbeats can’t be separated from their breathing, then they lie in “bra and purple skirt” under his “long black coat,” which he/Asle 1 always wears. It is sometimes difficult, sometimes confusing to sort out truth from fiction. Neither the narrator nor the reader is certain whether these events happened “sometime in the past” or are “just something [he’s] dreaming.” Or, in fact, is it “happening now in reality” to a couple Asle 1 is watching at a roadside viewing spot? What is clear is that the Asle from Dylgja is a painter who prays. The same description of painting opens both parts of The Other Name. It is “two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line.” It comes to be seen as St. Andrew’s Cross with sadomasochistic iconography. For Asle, it also contains a spiritualness, a “shining darkness” that he’s always trying to paint. He seeks “something of God in everything . . . the invisible in the visible.” These first two parts of the series close with the counting of the rosary, the narrator holding a “brown wooden cross” between thumb and finger, reciting a prayer, breathing in and out, asking for mercy. In that Asle knows the light in the darkness illuminates the hidden subject, the same can be said for The Other Name. Out of the darkness of the deep prose comes the saving light of the penitent. The Other Name: Septology I–II evokes the stunning autofiction of Fosse’s fellow Norwegian writers, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s (once Fosse’s creative-writing student) monumental My Struggle and Vigdis Hjorth’s controversial Will and Testament. Its striking characters and whiplash prose make for compulsive reading, engrossing from the start, unforgettable at the end. It is cerebral, challenging, and rewarding. It’s like reading an M. C. Escher print. It is a captivating meta-experience that leaves the reader Waiting for Fosse. Robert Allen Papinchak Valley Village, California bring us back repeatedly to the catalyst of the story in subtle ways. She masters both lateral and vertical m o v e m e n t within the same paragraph , especially at the ends of the chapters, by juxtaposing her lines, both grounding us in the physical images and elevating us to higher thought simultaneously. Bertino has a tendency to subvert readers ’ expectations at every turn. She breaks convention by including one chapter from Simone’s point of view, when the rest of the novel is written from the bride’s. Here, Simone has a...

Introduction

This issue of Soundings might be thought of as an extended consideration of the concept famously addressed in John Keats's 1820 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and especially the canonical line from its closing stanza, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” What is the exact relationship between art, beauty, balance, and truth? Can and should considerations of beauty be used in assessing seemingly nonaesthetic ideas and concepts? What is the nature of the boundaries between “art” and “reality” and what is gained through pushing these boundaries to their breaking point? How are works of art and artists shaped by historical and philosophical notions of law, justice, morality? Can beauty and truth, however defined, be reconciled? These questions are unpacked and explored by the contributors in this issue.To begin, Junxiao Bai's “The Spectrum of the Divine Order: Goodness, Beauty, and Harmony” interprets the writings and ideas of Ptolemy and Augustine in considering the relation between a harmonious world order and the divine. Exploring deeply their notions of numerical and musical harmonic ratios and the connections of these ratios to the cosmos, the author concludes that Augustine saw such perfect relationships between numbers and music as evidence of God's divine order in both the physical and metaphysical realms.Devon Brickhouse-Bryson considers somewhat similar conceptual territory in his article on the relationships between judgments of beauty and judgments of theory. Interpreting a method of evaluating theories known as “reflective equilibrium” through which common sense principles are weighed against background theories, Brickhouse-Bryson makes an engaging case for both the centrality of the idea of coherence in this evaluative method, and for the idea that such judgments of coherence can best be conceived of as species of judgments of beauty. This insight, he argues, will help theoreticians more effectively understand reflective equilibrium and devise epistemically better theories.Next, Jenessa Kenway examines the “blurring of life and art” in the works of visual and literary realist and hyperrealist artists. Focusing particularly on nineteenth-century French realist painter Gustave Courbet, the late twentieth-century superrealist American sculptor Duane Hanson and the contemporary Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, she considers the intersections between their deep exploration of the repetitive, mundane reality that makes up most of human existence. Kenway imaginatively argues that these artists force their readers and viewers to confront the truth of what she characterizes as “the thought stream running through non-being,” but also to recognize the richness of considerations of daily “nothingness.”Finally, Mark Packer reinterprets Herman Melville's classic unfinished novella Billy Budd through the intersecting prisms of literary criticism, jurisprudence, philosophy, and American and British history. In “‘Yet the Angel Must Hang’: Billy Budd and Melville's Moral Skepticism,” Packer concentrates on the moral ambiguity that permeates so much of the novel and explores its legal and historical implications. He connects the struggle in the story (set in 1797), between how to balance admiralty law and natural morality in determining Billy Budd's fate for having killed a superior officer, with similar tensions experienced by Melville's anti-slavery father-in-law and Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice who reluctantly upheld the Fugitive Slave Act and similar legislation. Packer concludes that Melville's refusal to provide a morally definitive conclusion was a product of this history of the refusal of men in positions of authority to act on spiritual wisdom rather than legal mandate.Collectively, these works provide multiple approaches toward considering the nature of the boundaries and distinctions between art and life, law, and justice, and the everyday and the sublime—issues that remain as vexed and pertinent today as in Keats's time.