The Advent of Noo-politics in Ibsen’s Problem Plays

Abstract

Literary history is often seen in the light of the history of ideas, and rarely as corresponding to the media technologies that transmit these ideas. It would, however, be difficult to explain the international success of the Norwegian “Modern Breakthrough authors” without taking into account the transnational mediation of the political, social, philosophical, and esthetic ideas of the period. “The Modern Breakthrough” in Norwegian literature is not just a response to Georg Brandes’ 1871 call to arms. It is also an esthetic response to a media technological revolution that radically changed Norwegian society in the second half of the nineteenth century. As media historians Henrik G. Bastiansen and Hans Fredrik Dahl have emphasized, the years of Ibsen’s literary production delineates an epoch of faster and more powerful media developments than ever before in history. Catilina (1950) was published four years before Norway got its first railroad. When We Dead Awaken (1899) was written in Arbien’s Street in Kristiana, while they were screening cinema shows down the street (Bastiansen and Dahl 2003a). The railroad, telegraph, photography, film, phonograph, and telephone all surface in Norway within this short period of less than 50 years. These technologies dramatically changed the scales and patterns of human interaction during Ibsen’s time, and it would be naïve to think that the playwright did not in some way chart their societal impact. But how do we read Ibsen from a media perspective? The aim of this article is to show how Ibsen’s problem plays respond to the rise of the newspaper industry in late nineteenth