Authors:Anne Hemkendreis Pages: 1 - 12 Abstract: This paper examines the five different Thule postal stamps which circulated from 1935 to 1936 between the trading post of Thule (which is the Danish name for the settlement of Uummannaq in Northwest Greenland, today Thule Air Base) and the Cape York post office in Copenhagen. The images on the stamps not only concentrate and visualize the complex colonial history between Greenland and Denmark. Instead, they also dynamize and preserve historical power relations by making them physically and visually tangible to this day. The stamps bear witness to infra-structures of cultural exchange, which were strongly controlled by the Danish side. They are often overlooked testimonies of everyday communication and mark colonial relations as ongoing and still powerful forces. What is more, the stamps provide their own agency as cultural-creating forces which sheds a new light to the history of Western modernization and its heritage. PubDate: 2022-06-22 DOI: 10.7557/13.6321 Issue No:Vol. 49, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Per Esben Myren-Svelstad Pages: 1 - 20 Abstract: This article explores the contributions of the author Åsmund Sveen in the propaganda of the Norwegian Nazi party (NS). Earlier research on Sveen’s commitment to NS has had recourse to homophobic stereotypes in order to explain how a man living in a homosexual relationship could work for an ideology hostile to homosexuality. In this article, I consider the problem from the opposite perspective by instead asking how NS could accept Sveen’s inclusion of a homoerotic poem in a propaganda anthology of Norwegian literature. Reading Sveen’s propaganda in the light of a vitalist aesthetics and an ambiguous construction of masculinity, I argue that the relationship between homoeroticism and Nazism is a complex one in Sveen’s texts, but also in modern culture at large. Thus, a utopian vision of masculinity could be palatable to Nazi ideology. PubDate: 2022-06-22 DOI: 10.7557/13.5578 Issue No:Vol. 49, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Ruben Moi Pages: 1 - 15 Abstract: «Pangur Bán» is probably the best know poem in Celtic studies, and a poem that tends to become increasingly more popular to audiences outside of Ireland. However, the anonymous, medieval poem has been cherished throughout history for a wide range of poetic, philosophical, intellectual and educational reasons. To inquire into the longevity and popularity of a marginal gloss on his cat by an Irish monk in a German monastery in the ninth century seems appropriate at a time when contemporary literature and applied hermeneutics of all kinds tend to dominate the literary discourses. This essay relates the historical poem to its many translations, for example by Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, and current literary discourses. Why has this enigmatic jeu d’esprit been translated so frequently and why are these translations important' This essay argues that «Anonymous: Myself and Pangur», Muldoon’s version of «Pangur Bán», can be read as a prismatic poem for postmodernist concerns, in his own poetry and in recent theories. PubDate: 2022-06-22 DOI: 10.7557/13.6480 Issue No:Vol. 49, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Benedikt Jager Pages: 1 - 16 Abstract: This article explores Norwegian author Ingvar Ambjørnsen’s short story «The Heart of the Forest» from his collection Dark Dawn (1997) and focuses on the story’s prime experience, that of drugs. Peter Sloterdijk’s account of the historical development of drugs from the early Greek era to modernity is the theoretical framework. His understanding is found in Ambjørnsen’s short text, which also contains a notion of intertextuality. Therefore, the article highlights both literary (Vesaas) and philosophical references (Huxley). «The Heart of the Forest» is also the precursor for Ambjørnsen’s novel The Night Dreaming of Day (2012), which implies that the author sampled his own short story and gave it a pessimistic reinterpretation. PubDate: 2022-06-22 DOI: 10.7557/13.6444 Issue No:Vol. 49, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Rikke Andersen Kraglund Pages: 1 - 17 Abstract: This article examines narrative aspects of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star (2020) with a special interest in the novel’s supernatural and apocalyptic elements. At the publication of the book, it was discussed whether the supernatural events in the novel should be explained based on real-world frames and pre-existing cognitive parameters or more fantastical (NRK 2020). Within the framework of unnatural narratology, I want to emphasize that the narratives can go beyond imaginable real-world situations and a mimetic explanation may miss something crucial about the narrative when treating the unnatural as hallucinations or dreams. PubDate: 2022-06-22 DOI: 10.7557/13.6514 Issue No:Vol. 49, No. 1 (2022)
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