Volume 43, Issue 2

Peer Gynt is usually considered to be Brand in negative, a modern subject without kernel and coherence in contrast to Brand’s God-given substantial identity. Treating the two dramatic poems as a diptych the present essay takes the two men to struggle with the same predicament. The first driven by a misunderstood longing for wholeness, the second by fear of diversity, they represent opposed reactions to modernity. Brand has to lose his confidence and monolithic will, while Peer has to realize the emptiness of his lust and vanity. To be a self is neither to be the passive tool of Law and conventions nor the sovereign author of one’s own actions, it is to engage in imaginative anticipation, a leap that may as well end in madness. In both plays the protagonists actually attain the position of autonomous subject, though they do not live to realize it in practical life. This may be due to an inherent paradox of human existence, or it may be a way to expose the subject as the ‘interface’ of the individual’s old life, and the new one, the disjunction of ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’. In this sense Ibsen’s plays all end unresolved as an appeal to the spectators’ liberty.

In the summer of 1892 the Danish author, poet and critic Johannes Jørgensen discovered the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer, Jørgensen soon found an ally in the struggle for the vindication of metaphysics to which he was already dedicated when he encountered Schopenhauer. Between the autumn of 1893 and late 1894 Jørgensen published numerous articles in the Danish periodical ‘Taarnet’ and other literary periodicals, in which the philosophy of Schopenhauer is of great importance. This article examines the relation between this reception of Arthur Schopenhauer and the attraction to general metaphysical and specific Christian worldviews that Jørgensen had already begun to indicate. Furthermore, the article discusses how far the reception is to be understood as merely a pragmatic application of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy in a syncretistic metaphysical position, or as a profound preoccupation with the Schopenhauerian philosophy in its own right.

This article suggests that contemporary horror film responds to societal currents beyond the film industry, perhaps in particular in smaller cinema nations like Sweden without an established tradition of horror film. It explores the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (2008) as a unique contribution to a socially committed phase of the genre. It argues that the film can be read as an allegory of a declining Swedish national folkhem, and that the suburb stands for a miniature Sweden and the vampire a figure of the political, social, and demographic transformations characterizing Sweden since the 1980s. The vampire is primarily discussed as a contradictory figure of national anxieties in a postindustrial and multicultural age, both threatening the traditional community with its racial and androgynous otherness and infusing it with new energy.

The article briefly describes the creation of the Danish arts funding system and outlines the most important ideas concerning the relationship between literature and the welfare state and the never-ending discussion of the idea and principles of supporting the arts with public means. Anders Bodelsen, Kirsten Thorup, Christina Hesselholdt and Kristian Foss Bang are some of the many authors who have received art support during the last 45 years and the article shows how a selection of their works thematizes the new human relations of the defamiliarised welfare state. The relationship between the individual, his fellow human beings and society has in their novels been interpreted in intriguingly different narrations.

A large number of Danish literary works from the postwar period contributed to the founding values of the welfare state with their dialogic, existential and religious themes. In these works truth lies in inter-subjectivity: they were qualifying the values of the welfare state with the assertion that a relationship to one’s surroundings, based on dialogue and a religious mode of interpreting existence, is more conducive to welfare-thinking than the idea of the sovereignty of the individual. In this article, an example is given with an examination of some of the early works of Peter Seeberg (1925-99).

The essay discusses a crucial notion in the modern biopolitical welfare state: that good health is beneficiary both for the individual and for society at large. It compares and juxtaposes this hegemonic idea to literary works by the Danish authors, Dorrit Willumsen and Lars Skinnebach, who in various ways articulate dissent from this notion. Special attention is given to the topic of healthy ageing and longevity.

This article investigates phenomena such as ethnicity, gender and the Danish welfare state in contemporary Danish fiction by drawing on Sara Ahmeds concepts of ‘melancholic migrants’ and ‘unhappy diversity’. An underlying assumption is that migrant fiction is contributing to the construction of new, and more encompassing national identities.

In this article, we study the relationship between the United States of America and Norden, first showing how images of the Nordic model were constructed and reproduced in the United States from the 1920s until the 1960s. We find both utopias and dystopias in these narratives. Second, the article argues that these American images, narratives, and stereotypes did not only fulfill a function in the American debate, but were also relayed back to Norden, and affected debate, nation-branding strategies, and self-understandings there. During the Cold War, furthermore, the Nordic welfare state image gained a new currency which reached well beyond national borders, far into transnational space.

This article shows how the right wing populist politician Mogens Glistrup changed ‘the order of discourse’ in the Danish political debate about the welfare state in the 1970s. He did this in three ways. Firstly, by making use of a highly ironic, sarcastic and anecdotical rhetoric against the public sector and the high tax levels in Denmark. Secondly, Glistrup re-launched a series of discourses such as ‘skrankepave’ and ‘papirnusser’ which directly framed a negative sentiment regarding the public sector. Thirdly, Glistrup’s style was based on the use of profane words and slang in his speeches in parliament. This article shows how the other political parties on the one hand attacked Glistrup’s and fellow party members use of what in their eyes seemed obscene and inappropriate words and on the other hand how Glistrup at the same time was successful in disseminating some of these phrases to the parties that criticized him.