'På vakt skal man være' : om litterariteten i Karl Ove Knausgårds 'Min kamp'

Abstract

You have to be on your guard - On Literariness in Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle

This dissertation is a discussion of literariness in Karl Ove Knausgård,s novel My Struggle (2009-2011). I argue that My Struggle first and foremost is a novel and should be read accordingly. Though Knausgård might challenge the genre of the novel as we know it, I show how he does so within the framework of one of the strongest traditions in the 20th century. This tradition includes writers such as Proust, Joyce, and Thomas Mann, all of whom, like Knausgård, have sought to challenge the novel as such. Thus, Knausgård is stretching the limits of what a novel can be by taking his point of departure in the challenge that already exists in the genre. Read this way, Knausgård expands the limits of what a novel is and can do, so it becomes impossible to ignore him as a novelist. The dissertation is based on five articles published, or accepted for publication, in peer-reviewed academic journals. Combined, these articles show how Knausgård as a writer belongs to a literary tradition that can be seen as an extension of literary modernism. In each article, I identify what I have named the central paradox of the novel that Knausgård wants to write honestly about his life, but can only do so in the form of a novel and by using the literary devices from the world of fiction. It is through the analysis of this central paradox that I portray the literariness of the novel. Aside from the five articles, the dissertation also consists of a cap or a summarizing report where I place the articles in relation to the existing scholarship on Knausgård and explain my theoretical framework and why I consider it important to read My Struggle as novel. Here, I argue that the dissertation is in clear opposition to the majority of what has previously been written on Knausgård, where the focus has been on how Knausgård plays with reality and fiction instead of striving to understand what the novel is trying to say.

På vakt skal man være når hendelser former seg til en fortelling, for fortellingen hører litteraturen og ikke livet til.

Sådan skriver Karl Ove Knausgård i det sjette og sidste bind af Min kamp (2009-2011). Knausgård kalder selv værket for en roman, men alligevel har mange valgt at læse det som en selvbiografi eller som autofiktion.

Afhandlingen På vakt skal man være tager forfatteren på ordet og sætter samtidig romangenren til diskussion. For samtidig med, at Knausgård udfordrer genren, gør han det inden for rammerne af modernismen og dermed en af de stærkeste litterære traditioner i det 20. århundrede

Det er en tradition, der rummer forfattere som Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann og James Joyce, der alle, som Knausgård, har udfordret romangenren.

Gennem nærlæsninger af udvalgte passager af Min kamp viser På vakt skal man være, hvordan Knausgård udvider grænserne for romanen med en sådan autoritet, at det er umuligt at ignorere ham som en af traditionens største romanforfattere.