Pris: 240,-

Oppsummering

Editors’ Introduction
With Sult (Hunger, 1890), Knut Hamsun wrote himself into world literary history.
His strong international position was reaffirmed thirty years later when Markens
grøde (Growth of the Soil) earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet, for those
interested in a broad pursuit of Knut Hamsun’s literary contributions, very little has
been published in English. One finds Hamsun biographies, overviews of Hamsun’s
oeuvre in literary histories, articles containing analyses of various works, and a few
dissertations and monographs. While these texts constitute significant contributions
to Hamsun research in general, and to the dissemination of Hamsun studies
in English, it seems to us that the international field of literary studies could benefit
from a book presenting an overall contemporary view of Hamsun’s writing. Knut
Hamsun: Transgression andWorlding is aimed at students and literary scholars within
the fields of Scandinavian Studies, Comparative Literature, and Western/World
Literature. The aim of the book is to present Hamsun’s writings from a wide variety
of contemporary theoretical perspectives, organized under the overall headings of
transgression and worlding.
Transgression refers to Hamsun’s aesthetic and ideological boundary breaking. It
is a term that covers the span of his career from his fin de siècle novels that secured
him a position as a pioneer of modernism to his later writing in which his politically
provocative and reactionary views relegated him to a position as Norway’s
most problematic author. The book’s section on aesthetic transgressions reflects a
present-day interest in the interplay between fact and fiction, the autobiographical
fictionalization of the Self, the fetishism of everyday objects, and humor and satire
as destabilizing tropologies. The book’s section on ideological transgressions reflects
contemporary interests in eco-criticism, liberalism, gender, Fascism, modernism,
and the overall relationship between ethics and aesthetics.
The title of the book’s last section, worlding, refers to an overall problematization
of the ethno- and Eurocentrism that has governed literary studies in terms of socalled
world and national literatures. Through concepts of worlding, the analyses
in this section emphasize the global aspects of an imaginary geography in Hamsun’s
works; explore the worldwide reception, transculturation, and remediation of his most famous works; and suggest new constellations of area studies that transcend
national borders, emphasizing in particular the relationship between Scandinavia
and the United States. Key concepts in this section are mapping, migration, postcolonialism,
the transatlantic, and the transnational.
All of the authors contributing to this book were active participants in events
marking the 2009 celebration of the 150th anniversary of Hamsun’s birth. Most
participated with papers at the international Hamsun conference arranged by Ståle
Dingstad at the University of Oslo at the end of August. Some contributed with
public lectures at the opening of the newHamsun Center in Hamarøy in the beginning
of August. Others participated with papers on Hamsun at the 2009 Society
for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies conference in Madison, Wisconsin,
in April.
A brief description of the individual contributions follows: In the first section,
Ståle Dingstad covers Hamsun’s authorship broadly, situating it within a tradition
of national satire. Dingstad’s point of departure partly belongs to the classical and
philosophical field of education as he is interested in delineating the kind of education
and critical thinking Hamsun attained and, in turn, sought to provide his
readers. Like Dingstad, Peter Sjølyst-Jackson focuses on Hamsun’s humorous side.
His approach is partly philological as he combs through various documents pertaining
to Hamsun’s laughter-producing debut, discovering how Hamsun’s sense
of humor and his depictions of humorous situations changed over time. Stephanie
von Schnurbein covers Hamsun’s literary works widely by employing recent conceptions
of fetishism developed within the field of cultural theory. Fetishism is a
concept that connects three great regimes of domination in modernity: imperialism,
capitalism, and patriarchy/heteronormativity and thus provides a new context
in which to analyze objects in Hamsun’s texts. Ellen Rees explores the broader narrative
implications suggested by the enigmatic first-person narrator in Hamsun’s
often overlooked “Wanderer trilogy.” By employing Jon Helt Haarder’s concepts of
“performative biographism” and “biographical irreversibility,” she shows how the
three texts are connected through an ambiguous “I” that Hamsun employs in order
to problematize his own person in his fiction. Unni Langås focuses on På gjengrodde
Stier (On Overgrown Paths) and Hamsun’s rhetorical strategies in presenting himself
as an old man who may be hard of hearing and weak of eyesight, but who definitely
does not suffer “permanently impaired mental capacities,” the diagnosis pronounced
by Professor Gabriel Langfeldt in his psychiatric exam of the author in 1946.
In the second section of the book, Atle Kittang starts out by framing Hamsun
within a European modernist tradition. He then focuses particularly on Hamsun’s
journalistic writing from New York and relates this directly to Hamsun’s subsequent
depiction of Kristiania (present-day Oslo) in Hunger. Dean Krouk criticizes
a historiographic tendency to attempt to identify traces of Fascism retroactively in
Hamsun’s early work without considering the complex development of Fascism as an ideology. Drawing on contemporary theory on historiography and Fascism, he
shows how Hamsun’s development ought to be understood through the concept
of “sideshadowing,” rather than through the concept of “backshadowing.” Walter
Baumgartner focuses more directly on Hamsun’s political development and how
this was received in theGerman-speaking world, not least by ThomasMann. Baumgartner’s
chapter contains extensive passages in which Mann evaluates Hamsun.
These have not previously been translated into English and as such may form an
interesting source for further research. Erik Bjerck Hagen starts out reminding us
that Hamsun is actually a popular author who appeals to a broad contemporary
reading audience. He then discusses Hamsun’s complexity by following a line of
reception illustrating how critics have always found weaknesses as well as strengths
in his writing. Britt Andersen adds a decisive gender perspective by focusing on the
crisis of masculinity as it comes across in the satirical novel Siste kapitel (Chapter
the Last). The main theoretical source of inspiration for this analysis is Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s No Man’s Land. Finally, in the second section, Henning
Howlid Wærp revisits Growth of the Soil as an environmental novel from the perspective
of ecocriticism. Reading the novel into a context of American wilderness
writing—drawing on texts by Gary Snyder,HenryDavid Thoreau, and James Lovelock—
he defines the novel as a source of meditation on the topic of sustainable
living in a modern, now global, world.
In the section on worlding, Troy Storfjell analyzes the “worlding” that occurs in
Growth of the Soil in three ways. In a postcolonial tradition, he focuses on the world as
it is mentioned and depicted within the fictional universe. In addition, he highlights
Hamsun’s American inspiration by showing how the novel may be read within the
genre of a settler narrative and—additionally—by showing how it may be read as
inspired byMark Twain. Elisabeth Oxfeldt similarly reads a later novel, Landstrykere
(Wayfarers), from a postcolonial point of view by examining the “worlding” that
occurs in this novel with a particular focus on the role of Africa. Her method is
postcolonial as well as new historical as she relates the novel’s discourse on “abroad”
to that of contemporaneous Norwegian school books. Peter Mortensen brings in
transatlantic studies as they have been introduced and developed by, among others,
Paul Gilroy and David Armitage. This leads Mortensen to choose Hamsun’s brief
travel depiction “Over havet” (“Across the Ocean”) as his point of departure. This
text opens up for an exploration not only of transatlantic migration and identity
formation, but also of late nineteenth-century journalism. Per Thomas Andersen
opens his chapter with a comparison ofHunger andDonDeLillo’s Cosmopolis, which
allows him to contrast a modern versus a postmodern condition. He then proceeds
to discuss the importance of places, arrivals, and departures in Hamsun’s oeuvre,
focusing in particular on idyllic tropes, or “chronotopes,” in Growth of the Soil. At
the end, he links back to urbanity, showing the interdependence of the modern
and the premodern in Hamsun’s overall literary project. The last two chapters focus into Chinese from 1920 when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This historical
translation and reception study reveals how Hamsun ended up perceived as “politically
correct” in, at times, surprising ways. He concludes his article with a reading
of Growth of the Soil, illustrating how this novel, in particular, still seems highly
relevant from an ecological point of view. His reading of Growth of the Soil thus
concurs with that of Henning Howlid Wærp, and it may be worthwhile pointing
out that Troy Storfjell, in his chapter, appears to disagree with both of them. Arne
Lunde finally provides a historical overview of Hamsun film adaptations. These
span nearly a century and bring us from local Scandinavian contexts to European,
North American and Asian surroundings, illustrating how people around the world
have engaged creatively and critically with Hamsun’s fiction.
The possible reading paths through this book are many. One may follow our
organization into three sections, but it is also possible to focus on particular topics
such as the relationship between the United States and Norway (Ståle Dingstad,
Atle Kittang, Troy Storfjell, Peter Mortensen, and Per Thomas Andersen),
Hamsun’s reception abroad (Walter Baumgartner, Arne Lunde, and Chengzhou
He), Hamsun’s autobiographical references to his diseased body (Ellen Rees and
Unni Langås), Hamsun’s Fascism (Erik Bjerck Hagen, Atle Kittang, Walter Baumgartner,
and Dean Krouk), humor and satire (Ståle Dingstad, Peter Sjølyst-Jackson,
and Britt Andersen), postcolonialism and worlding (Troy Storfjell and Elisabeth
Oxfeldt), ecocriticism (Henning Wærp, Chengzhou He, Troy Storfjell, and Per
Thomas Andersen) and gender studies (Stephanie von Schnurbein and Britt Andersen).
Finally, in order to make it easier for the reader who is interested in particular
works rather than topical and theoretical approaches, we provide a work index.
Knut Hamsun: Transgression and Worlding finally contains translations into
English of two seminal essays written by Hamsun: “Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv”
(“From the Unconscious Life of the Mind,” 1890) and “Festina lente” (translated
as “What Is Progress?,” 1928). The first essay has not previously been available in
English, but has now been translated by Robert Ferguson. The second essay was
written for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of that
newspaper, and published simultaneously in various European countries. Together,
they are so important to Hamsun scholarship that we want to make them easily
available to non-Scandinavian speakers through this book.
We would like to extend sincere thanks to our authors for their thought-provoking
contributions and cooperation, to our various translators, and to the Department
of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo for financial
support for this publication.

Oslo, February 2011
Ståle Dingstad, Ylva Frøjd, Elisabeth Oxfeldt, and Ellen Rees (eds.)

Contributors:
Ståle Dingstad, University of Oslo
Peter Sjølyst-Jackson, Birmingham City University
Stefanie v. Schnurbein, Humboldt University Berlin
Ellen Rees, University of Oslo
Unni Langås, University of Agder
Atle Kittang, University of Bergen
Dean Krouk, University of California, Berkeley
Walter Baumgartner, University of Greifswald
Erik Bjerck Hagen, University of Bergen
Britt Andersen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Henning Howlid Wærp, University of Tromsø
Troy Storfjell, Pacific Lutheran University
Elisabeth Oxfeldt, University of Oslo
Peter Mortensen, Aarhus University
Per Thomas Andersen, University of Oslo
Chengzhou He, Nanjing University
Arne Lunde, University of California, Los Angeles