Hvordan lese Ibsen? Samtalen om hans dramatikk 1879–2015

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