(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
11 years after professor Atle Kittang#'s (1941–2013) passing, three literary scholars have now edited an anthology of selected texts by the literary scholar spanning 44 years, from 1968 to 2012. The book has become an impressive "Kittang Reader" for generations to come.
There is a big leap between Kittang and the person who institutionalized literary research in Norway, Gerhard Gran (1856–1925). For example, Arne Hannevik has written in his book about literary studiesone's professional history (2001) that Gran was not "preoccupied with methodological problems": The best method was "common sense". Despite many literature employees in individual positions, the subject did not get its own department at the University of Oslo until 1965 and a couple of years later at the University of Bergen. In 1974 Kittang became the first professor in Norway in the subject of general literature. Under Kittang's leadership, the subject in Bergen received "a clearer theoretical profile than in Oslo", according to Hannevik.
First and foremost, the distinctiveness of the literary work.
Literary studies has moved from literary history to literary theory. Kittang himself says that he "has had little attraction to literary history". He was primarily interested in the distinctiveness of the literary work. It is this interest that the anthology editors have made the selection's premise. By following his own intention, they provide an example of what Kittang himself called the "sympathetic" mode of reading. The very influential article "Three forms of understanding in literature research" i Literary criticism problem (1975) has influenced generations of literature students. Kittang's distinction between the sympathetic, the objectifying and the symptomatic way of reading today seems "roughly masked", claim the publishers of the anthology. Since so much has happened in theory development in the last fifty years, they have chosen to leave it out.
As a result, a number of historically important debates are de-prioritised. And Kittang's introduction to the deconstruction in Norwegian literary yearbook in the mid-1980s was important, but is not included. It triggered a response from the philosopher Hans Skjervheim, who warned against "intellectual suicide". The debate that Ane Farsethås started with the review of Kittangs Ibsen's heroism (2002) in Prosa 1-2003, is not mentioned here. Nor is the extensive debate on 'autonomy aesthetics' in which Kittang participated, but fortunately several of Kittang's contributions are included. Bjarne Markussen's well-read overview article "Can text interpretation be science?" (Edda 4-2013), dedicated to "Atle Kittang in memoriam", could have been mentioned. Likewise, a number of critical comments against Kittang from Erik Bjerck Hagen.
Between imagination and reason
"No sociology can replace literary analysis", asserts Kittang, and rightly so. But is that enough to talk about the autonomy of literature? Kittang often links autonomy to the philosopher Immanuel Lace: Art must follow its own law and not any other law, then it would be heteronomous (p. 298).
But the allegedly "free play" between imagination and reason that Kant thought the work of art brought to life is not free in practice. Freud's method of associating "freely" with dreams in order to interpret them showed that what appears autonomous follows certain patterns, which in turn are partly culture-dependent. Kant formulated his aesthetics in a series of antinomies or paradoxes. The judgment of taste should be objective without purpose and not be interested in the object's existence (as in practical philosophy). Aesthetics also does not consist in recognizing the world in concepts (as in theoretical philosophy). If I see a still life of a dish of apples, the taste judgment "The apples are beautiful" means neither that my mouth waters and I want to eat them, nor that I want to weigh them to find out how many kilograms are in the dish. If the painting is beautiful, it gives the viewer "disinterested pleasure", according to Kant.
Kittang has dozens of references to Kant's aesthetics, but here Kittang is never critical. This is because "Kant is an important philosophical starting point for the various variants of autonomy thinking that we find in modern aesthetics and literary theory". But is "stimulation and excitement" ('Reiz und Rührung') disqualifying for an aesthetic experience, as Kant claimed? If it is only the "pleasure" ('Wohlgefallen') that is aesthetic, then the Greek tragedy in Aristotle's interpretation must be unsightly, since it produces fear and pity. Through the allegedly free play between imagination and reason, "art serves to educate, strengthen and develop both our cognitive abilities and our moral abilities. In this sense, art is indispensable for 'forming' us as free, rational and – yes, precisely: autonomous being” (p. 298). This tradition is continued by American New Criticism and Russian Formalism. According to Kittang, this is the theoretical basis for a text analytical method called 'close reading'. But it is quite possible to argue that if one's mouth waters instead of experiencing disinterested pleasure at the sight of a painting of apples, then this is precisely a criterion that the painting works aesthetically. My conclusion is therefore that close reading is good, but that Kant's aesthetics are obsolete.
Close reading is good, but Kant's aesthetics are outdated.
Kittang tended to find the same perspective everywhere, a duality, "a double movement" or a ambiguity in the literary work. And the world is full of contradictions. There are great writers too, they absorb society's contradictions and present them in their work, and always exceed their own intentions. More or less they also become victims of their works, just as we all have to bear both intended and unintended consequences of our actions. Many of Kittang's close readings demonstrate this point convincingly.
Beyond the aesthetics of autonomy?
However, Kittang did not only depend on readings of works to find doublets, contradictions or "double movements". In the anthology on Ibsen and Brandes that he edited together with Jørgen Dines Johansen and Astrid Sæther in 2006, he quoted Georg Brandes about the task of literary research: "The comparative Literaturbetragtning has the double character of approaching what is alien to us in such a way that we could appropriate it , and to remove our own from us in such a way that we could oversee it." IN emigrant literatures (1872) Brandes turned his attention to a group of poets who had a similar double vision, namely the French émigré writers. exileKittang took up Ibsen's distance-creating double perspective both biographically and theoretically. The duality was therefore not limited to works, but was for Kittang also a determination of the relationship between individual and society.
You can always learn something from Kittang, and the book about him provides many interpretations and theoretical contributions worth reading. Kittang's insistence on close reading warns against hasty ideological historical categorizations and easy-to-buy criticism of ideology. Sociologists cannot replace literary analysis. But literary analysis cannot replace historical-biographical studies of the relationship between life and work, of the literary and historical context of ideas, the work's social connection or how it was received in contemporary times. The young Kittang therefore read poetry ideologically critical. He wrote about Stein Mehrens Aurora the Ninth Darkness in Syn og Segn in 1970 and asked the question:
"What is the actual relationship between, on the one hand, Wanaka, the Poet and all the other variants of the Olympic Hero that have dominated Western cultural tradition from antiquity to the present day, and on the other hand, the ideological heroism of our own time: the cultivation of the cowboy, the sports hero , the fashion surgeon or the career-minded entrepreneur? Or between Goethe's, Ibsen's and Mehren's own cultivation of the feminine You, and modern advertising and PR speculation around the same myth? Between the western press's glorification of exclusive love, and Mehren's own hymns?"
In the preface, the editors strongly emphasize what Kittang called "The secret life of poetry" – the title of his latest book from 2012. According to Kittang, the art of poetry opens up "for voices other than those that buzz around us in everyday life". Poetry is a fundamentally different form of experience than everyday life, claim the publishers. With Roland Barthes, they perceive slow reading and re-reading as "a no to the market forces' ideology of consumption and growth".
However, fear of propaganda with a clear message does not have to lead to a flight from current affairs. Paradoxically, therefore, the editors by highlighting Kittang as , tonomy aesthetic made him more unique than he was. It is therefore to be hoped that this anthology will be so successful that Gyldendal publishes another anthology that shows other sides of a researcher who for many years was the very flagship of Norwegian literary studies.
