![]() ![]() We who do identify become like little children who cry out in the theater to warn Little Red Riding Hood that the wolf is lurking right behind her. Ever since modernism became the dominant aesthetic norm in literary studies, we have been told that only naïve readers identify with characters in novels. ![]() This identification has turned out to be a challenge ― not for the masses of enthusiastic My Struggle readers, but for literary scholars. Yet this does not prevent me from identifying intensely with the scenes in the second book of My Struggle, in which an angry and frustrated Knausgaard wheels a stroller through the streets of Stockholm. ![]() He is a man, I am a woman I am half a generation older. There is more that separates than unites us. How could I fail to identify with a Norwegian writer from the south of Norway, whose mother and father, like my own, come from the west coast and Vest-Agder respectively a writer who, also like me, never lived in Oslo, went to university in Bergen, and left Norway to live abroad?Īt the same time, my identification is puzzling. Knausgaard moved into a new housing development in the southern region of Vest-Agder in the 1970s I had the same experience in the 1960s. Sociologically speaking this is not surprising, for Knausgaard's trajectory is reminiscent of my own. I read Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle like most Norwegians: with passionate engagement and identification. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |