Ibsen StudiesPub Date : 2015-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2015.1099862
Ellen Rees
{"title":"Hvordan lese Ibsen? Samtalen om hans dramatikk 1879–2015","authors":"Ellen Rees","doi":"10.1080/15021866.2015.1099862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2015.1099862","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction Erik Bjerck Hagen is an engaging and often polemical scholar committed to a narrative about the study of literature in which – essentially – little scholarship of value is produced after 1970, or better yet after World War II. In his latest book, he sets out to prove this in relation to Ibsen scholarship. The core of his argument is that scholars who attempt to use critical theory to interpret Ibsen add nothing substantive to what we already know through the insights and hard work of earlier critics and scholars. Hagen points out that Hvordan lese Ibsen? is “like mye en bok om norsk forskningsog kritikkhistorie som om Ibsen” (9) [just as much a book about the history of Norwegian research and criticism as about Ibsen]. This is an ambitious claim that requires extensive empirical data and careful analysis to support. The book’s greatest strength is that it unearths a great deal of insightful Ibsen criticism that, as Hagen rightly points out, contemporary scholars have neglected or ignored for far too long. Hagen chooses five of Ibsen’s works and then dedicates a chapter to each, in which he establishes an interpretive consensus for the play in question, and then discusses a handful of theory-informed readings of it that he views as misguided. The methodological problems with this approach should be glaringly obvious. The four post1970 analyses of A Doll House that Hagen chooses to engage with, for example, are in no way representative; they are simply four analyses with which Hagen happens to disagree. His critiques of the scholarship are in many cases insightful, interesting, and always engagingly written, but to extrapolate further that this says anything meaningful about the state of Norwegian Ibsen scholarship as a whole after","PeriodicalId":41285,"journal":{"name":"Ibsen Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":"102 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15021866.2015.1099862","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59953805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ibsen StudiesPub Date : 2014-07-03DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2014.998046
L. Senelick
{"title":"How Ibsen Fared in Russian Culture and Politics","authors":"L. Senelick","doi":"10.1080/15021866.2014.998046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.998046","url":null,"abstract":"Flying into Moscow from the West in the Soviet era, one could see the city ringed round by a green belt. This was the Khimki Forest, an immemorial woodland of old-growth birch trees that harbored a dense ecology of flora and fauna. Nowadays the passenger sees the forest pocked by the roofs of Mcmansions, built by oligarchs in defiance of zoning laws or natural topography. What’s worse, a highway to St Petersburg has been projected, evoking mass protest on environmental grounds. The project was suspended in 2010, but not before Mikhail Beketov, a crusading investigative reporter, was severely beaten, losing one leg and four fingers as a result. Beketov died in Khimki on 8 April 2013 of cardiac arrest, a belated result of the attack. Three weeks later, the first Russian production of An Enemy of the People in over a century opened at the Mayakovsky Theatre in Moscow. The poster displayed a Victorian gentleman in a morning coat and top hat, wearing a gas mask. It signaled that the production would be a provocation. The title itself was a challenge. Konstantin Stanislavsky’s production of 1901 had been called, less provocatively, Doctor Stockmann. “Enemy of the people” (vrag naroda), originally a Jacobin term of abuse, was revived by Lenin in 1917 to tar the Constitutional Democratic Party. The aspersion was cast far and wide by Stalin during the agrarian collectivization movement of the early 1930s to attack “kulaks,” recalcitrant peasants, and again during the purges of 1937. The accused were made to denounce themselves and others as enemies of the people, an accusation constantly repeated in the charge sheets. In a Russian context, it is heavily freightedwith sinister connotations. Ibsen Studies, 2014 Vol. 14, No. 2, 91–108, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.998046","PeriodicalId":41285,"journal":{"name":"Ibsen Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"108 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15021866.2014.998046","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59953544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ibsen StudiesPub Date : 2014-07-03DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2014.999456
Giuliano D’Amico
{"title":"Biografisk leksikon til Ibsens brev – med tidstavle","authors":"Giuliano D’Amico","doi":"10.1080/15021866.2014.999456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.999456","url":null,"abstract":"The present book is a biographical dictionary of Henrik Ibsen's letters, based on volumes XII–XV of the new edition of his collected writings, Henrik Ibsens Skrifter (HIS, 2005–2010). It groups tog...","PeriodicalId":41285,"journal":{"name":"Ibsen Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"167 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15021866.2014.999456","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59953105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ibsen StudiesPub Date : 2014-07-03DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2015.1005904
Julia A. Walker
{"title":"Suez Modernism: Transportation, History, and Ibsen's Stylistic Shift","authors":"Julia A. Walker","doi":"10.1080/15021866.2015.1005904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2015.1005904","url":null,"abstract":"In the fall of 1869, Henrik Ibsen represented Norway at the ceremonies marking the inauguration of the Suez Canal. As a seafaring nation with a robust shipping economy, Norway had strong interests in the success of this unprecedented engineering feat whereby 98 miles of inland desert was cut away, creating an unbroken passageway between European ports with access to the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern ports beyond the Red Sea. Ibsen, ever flattered by official forms of recognition, was happy to attend, finding himself in the company of other cultural luminaries, such as Théophile Gautier and Émile Zola among the 1600 guests in attendance (Farnie 1969, 83–87). Aside from his diary and a few poems, Ibsen wrote very little that explicitly addressed the Canal and his experiences in Egypt. Shortly thereafter, however, he completed his monumental Emperor and Galilean (1873) and sketched out notes for Pillars of Society (1877), plays that would mark a stylistic break with the poetic dramas of his early career and set the template for the realistic prose plays that announced the arrival of modern drama. Although critics have traditionally understood Ibsen’s stylistic shift to have been prompted by his intense intellectual exchange with the Danish critic Georg Brandes (see, e.g., Styan 1981, 19), I argue that it was also prompted by his experiences in Egypt. After all, Brandes’s Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (1871), with its imperative to address the social problems of the day, explains only the shift in subject matter that distinguishes Ibsen’s late from his early plays. It does not account for the development of his modernist dramatic form. Recent critics have attributed Ibsen’s stylistic shift to his break with idealist esthetics, finding both narrative and formal evidence to Ibsen Studies, 2014 Vol. 14, No. 2, 136–166, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2015.1005904","PeriodicalId":41285,"journal":{"name":"Ibsen Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"136 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15021866.2015.1005904","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59953164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ibsen StudiesPub Date : 2014-07-03DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2014.1000659
K. Gjesdal
{"title":"Nietzschean Variations: Politics, Interest, and Education in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People","authors":"K. Gjesdal","doi":"10.1080/15021866.2014.1000659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.1000659","url":null,"abstract":"Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) has had an unusual reception. Following A Doll’s House (1879) andGhosts (1881), plays that were scandalized upon performance only to be counted, relatively soon, among Ibsen’s most important works, An Enemy of the Peoplewas caught up by history in a different way. While the play has, no doubt, enjoyed bouts of popularity – including the many stagings that followed in thewake of its publication – late twentieth-centurycritics have worried about the political implications of Dr. Stockmann’s elitism and sometimes even compared it to the rhetoric of the later Nationalist Socialistmovement inGermany (Sage 2006, 3–5, 310–311; Ferguson 1996, 280ff ). The kind of elitist sentiments Dr. Stockmann airs inAn Enemy of the People are often associated with the teaching of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s work was much debated and discussed in Scandinavia when Ibsen was working on the play. Thus, critics have emphasized how Ibsen’s play resonates with a kind of aristocratic pathos that is not unlike the onewe find inwork of theGerman philosopher.While such a reading was prefigured in an essay by Anathon Aall at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, we findmore recent versions of the argument in works by Noreng (1969), de Figueiredo (2007) and Kittang (2005). In his reading ofAn Enemy of the People, Kittang speaks Ibsen Studies, 2014 Vol. 14, No. 2, 109–135, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.1000659","PeriodicalId":41285,"journal":{"name":"Ibsen Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"109 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15021866.2014.1000659","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59953346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ibsen StudiesPub Date : 2014-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2014.937152
Jens-Morten Hanssen
{"title":"The Fusion of the Man and His Work: John Gabriel Borkman with Ibsen's Mask","authors":"Jens-Morten Hanssen","doi":"10.1080/15021866.2014.937152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.937152","url":null,"abstract":"Henrik Ibsen is, without a doubt, an icon in the modern, secular sense of the term. One effect of his iconic standing is a recent trend within the tradition of Ibsen in performance. Ibsen is no longer just a playwright. An Ibsen production is not necessarily a staging of a play written by him. It may as well be a staging of a play written – or “pieced together” – by someone else, the plot of which is based on events in Ibsen’s life or the design of which is based on Ibsen’s works. Understandably, Ibsen may in these productions occasionally appear as a dramatic figure, as himself. In the past three decades, this trend has increased in volume, with a preliminary peak in the Ibsen Year 2006. The phenomenon is not at all restricted to Norway. Since 2006, productions like this have been traced in Norway, Mexico, USA, Italy, Argentina, Germany, England, Bangladesh, Japan, Canada, Spain, Sweden and China. The Ibsen character in these productions, if there is one, fulfils a number of dramaturgical functions. He may be portrayed in the form of a doll, a statue, a mute, an actor or an actress with lines of dialogue, of young or old age, thick or thin, tall or small. However, despite the diversity in the physical shaping of the Ibsen character, theatre audiences all over the world recognize the character as Ibsen within a fraction of a second when he enters the stage because of the activation of a set of simple, iconographic elements: whiskers, top hat, overcoat, glasses. When did Ibsen turn into an icon? In his latest book, Ibsen og fotografene, Peter Larsen investigates the phenomenon on the basis of photographs of Ibsen. Scrutinizing all extant portrait Ibsen Studies, 2014 Vol. 14, No. 1, 52–70, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.937152","PeriodicalId":41285,"journal":{"name":"Ibsen Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"52 - 70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15021866.2014.937152","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59953408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ibsen StudiesPub Date : 2014-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2014.937921
H. O. Andersen
{"title":"The Brand Poet Strikes Back: Peer Gynt as Part of a Norwegian Duel of Satires","authors":"H. O. Andersen","doi":"10.1080/15021866.2014.937921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.937921","url":null,"abstract":"Could Peer Gynt be read as a satiric response to A.O. Vinje's Travel Memoirs from the Summer of 1860 [Ferdaminne fra sumaren 1860] (1861)?With a text as rich, intricate and in many ways ahead of it...","PeriodicalId":41285,"journal":{"name":"Ibsen Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"71 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15021866.2014.937921","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59953495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ibsen StudiesPub Date : 2014-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2014.937153
Kamaluddin Nilu
{"title":"Democratisation Process in Interculturalism: Staging Ibsen within a Folk Theatrical form in Bangladesh","authors":"Kamaluddin Nilu","doi":"10.1080/15021866.2014.937153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.937153","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I will focus on the transformation process taking place within what I earlier have called complex forms of cultural encountering within theatre, that is, when a text from one culture is blended with a theatrical form from another culture. In the example used, the encounter is between Ibsen’s text, Ghosts (Gengangere) and a folk theatrical form of Bangladesh called Kushan Gan. Kushan Gan is a genre of popular performance in which episodes from the Ramayana are mostly enacted. It is performed during religious festivals of various deities including Kali, Bhagavati (Durga), Laksmi, Jagaddhatri and Saraswati. It is usually performed in the temple precinct or in the outer courtyard of homesteads. Kushan Gan is further described in Syed Jamil Ahmed’s Achinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre of Bengal (2000, 61–62). It is important to note that the production was made by traditional artists for a local audience. I will argue that the encountering process can be analysed by making use of the three-step approach of separation, replacement and incorporation. Through this process, the traditionally religious content of the particular folk form is replaced by a secular and reinterpreted Ibsen text which is presented through the artistic expression typical for this art form. In this way, Ibsen’s text becomes purely localised and clearly also political.","PeriodicalId":41285,"journal":{"name":"Ibsen Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"38 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15021866.2014.937153","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59953449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ibsen StudiesPub Date : 2014-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2014.937151
Giuliano D’Amico
{"title":"Six Points for a Comparative Ibsen Reception History","authors":"Giuliano D’Amico","doi":"10.1080/15021866.2014.937151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.937151","url":null,"abstract":"One of the postulates of literary comparison [ . . . ] is that an identity or kinship can be established between literary objects that are far removed in time and space [ . . . ], or between different national productions and traditions. In all such cases, nations and national spaces are viewed as distinct ensembles, closed in on themselves, entities that are irreducible to one another yet produce, on the basis of an autarchic specificity, literary objects that are more or less comparable. (2007, 214)","PeriodicalId":41285,"journal":{"name":"Ibsen Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"37 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15021866.2014.937151","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59953394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ibsen StudiesPub Date : 2013-11-01DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2013.849033
Narve Fulsås
{"title":"“…af stort est du kommen”. Henrik Ibsen og Skien (Acta Ibseniana Vol. 8)","authors":"Narve Fulsås","doi":"10.1080/15021866.2013.849033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2013.849033","url":null,"abstract":"In 1882 Georg Brandes wrote a portrait of Ibsen in which he stated that the author had been born “i smaa og fattige Forhold i en lille norsk By” [in petty and poor circumstances in a small Norwegian town]. The portrait was later included in Brandes’ Det moderne Gjennembruds Mænd (1883). Thanking Brandes for the portrait, Ibsen could not resist commenting on what he took to be a devaluation of his background:","PeriodicalId":41285,"journal":{"name":"Ibsen Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"171 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15021866.2013.849033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59953156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}