Current Research

1: Literature and Experiment

Since the beginning of the 19^th Century, at least, the experiment has been a vital aesthetic and poetological concept. German romanticism sought to understand the processes of literary creation in analogy to chemical reactions: New literary products should occur through the mixture of hitherto separate motives, forms and genres. This quest for a new experimental literature was later reformulated by the naturalist movement (with the theory of the scientific novel) and by the modern avant-garde (with the idea of literature as sound- and sign-experimentation).

Both the romantic and the modernist experiment presuppose a similarity between literary and scientific practices. The author and the scientist are epitomized as allies in a common project of discovery and innovation. As the modern discipline boundaries grow ever stronger, the experiment comes to uphold the possibility of contact between aesthetic perception on the one hand, and scientific cognition on the other.

In many contemporary works of literature, by contrast, the experiment is regarded more like a project of the past, as a story to be unearthed, rediscovered, interpreted and retold. Instead of science fiction, literature is on the way to become science archaeology.

The project “Literature and Experiment” will study historical transfers between literature and science by focusing on the experiment both as a motive of representation and as a principle of form. The interest is directed in particular to: A) Modes of experimentation in the 19^th Century, and B) the experiment as historical object in contemporary works of literature.

Through a series of case studies the project will focus on the following texts: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1811). Heinrich von Kleist: Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik (1811). Marcel Beyer: Flughunde (1996). Don DeLillo: The Body Artist (2001). Durs Grünbein: Vom Schnee oder Descartes in Deitschland (2003). Per Olov Enquist: Boken om Blanche och Marie (2004).

Paper presentations. Three finished articles, May 2005.

Tekstboks:
Figur 1 Ich wollte ich wäre eine Säure oder ein Alkali, so hätte es doch ein Ende, wenn man aus dem Salze geschieden wäre. Heinrich von Kleist, 1805.

2: Poetry from the Sickbed: Henrik Wergeland

Henrik Wergeland’s (1808-1845) poetical representation of motives like illness and disease do not begin with his own bad health in 1844 and the signs of a coming death in 1845, but can be traced back in time at least to his medical studies beginning in the autumn of 1834.

Whereas a poem like ”Medicinerens Troesbekjendelse” (1835) simply celebrates modern day medicine as a true descendant of the enlightenment project, the picture is far more complicated in “Pigen paa Anatomikamret” (1837). In this poem, the medical gaze directed toward the female body at the post-mortem examination comes to repeat the penetrating movement inflicted on the girl in her former life. Both the clinical gaze and the scalpel insert a wound on the dead body. And by borrowing a scene from the autopsy, even the author and the reader are drawn into these acts of violence.

Wergeland’s experience from the medical studies is also involved in his poems from the sickbed. One can see how pain, fever, nausea and chill are regarded as signs in need of interpretation. On the one hand, the signs point toward the malignant nature of the disease, on the other hand they can be reinterpreted, with the help of opium and imagination, to ecstatic excursions into foreign and propitious regions.

The project ”Poetry from the Sickbed” starts out from Wolfgang Schäffner’s thesis about an alliance between medicine and literature in the early 19^th century. According to Schäffner, both discourses are characterized by how they read and represent the body within the frames of a symptomal semiotics, a semiotics where the surface of signs becomes a hiding place for inner layers of meaning.

Lecture presented at Aesthetic seminar, University of Oslo, March 26, 2004.

Article in progress.

Det Iisdryps Rislen i min Barm,

og disse Stikk af Ild,

Lad Døden kalde det sin Seir!

Det er min Himmels Foraarsveir,

dens Vaarfrembrud –

snart kold snart varm,

min Saligheds April…

Henrik Wergeland, Paa Sygeleiet, august 1844.

Crossing borders (1905/2005)

Hundred years ago my ancestors on mother’s side migrated from the area around Ammarnäs in northern Sweden to Grönfjelldalen in Rana, northern Norway. The journey took place the same summer as Norway broke out from the political union with Sweden. The move from one mountain farm to another therefore came to imply a journey to a new country with new possibilities. The family resettlement was not mainly inflicted by the political situation, however, but rather by previous summers of frost damages and failed potato harvest.

There are almost no written sources from the journey, and the information handed over by oral tradition is also scarce. The mountain landscape between northern Norway and northern Sweden is still there, however, and the textual descriptions of this landscape go back in time at least to the early 17^th Century and the establishment of Nasa silver mines.

20th century authors like Marcel Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin and Winfried Sebald have demonstrated the proximity between walking and remembering, how memory can develop and go astray in the form of geographical excursions, routes and paths. Inspired by these authors, the project ”Border Crossing” will investigate the possibility of retracing the route from 1905 in the mind, on the map, in the mountain and in writing.

5 days mountain walk July 2005

Essay and photos.

Først nå i det siste har det gått opp for meg. At min opplyste bevissthet ikke rekker lenger enn to slektledd tilbake, så er det mørkt. Dag Solstad, Professor Andersens natt, 1996.