In my contribution I aim at giving a close reading of Hans E. Kinck’s novel “Renxssanse” focusing on two different aesthetic approaches to artistic creativity and craftsmanship, one of which is linked to Nordic romanticism and the other one to the epigonal forms of southern (Italian) Renaissance art, each of them with separate referential outlooks to Friedrich Schiller’s conceptions of naive vs. sentimental notions of literary representation. The nalysis shows how the main figure pays for his success as a master of superficial pseudo-renaissance art with the loss of his original talent and his decline as an artist that finally leads to his madness and death.
In all his novels Jan Kjærstad in a very significant manner makes use of pictorial descriptions. The objects, which he describes, oscillate between famous pictures of artists like Vermeer, Picasso, Gauguin, van Gogh and imaginary ones, which are the products of the author’s own phantasy. Together the descriptions of real and fictional objets d’art shape a network of interpictorial patterns, which are typical for Kjaerstad’s way of writing. These interfigural traces seem to me to be very important parts of the textual conception of his novels and they obviously have a metaphoric function. In my contribution I focus on some aspects of this metaphoric structure by means of pictorial description and show some semantic implications of the interpictorial relations and of the basic communications between verbal and graphic signs, which in the novels of Kjærstad can be traced back to a common point of departure, in which there is no difference between written and pictorial expression.
The term picaresque is usually limited to narrative forms of expression, prose fiction and novels. New research has, however, shown that the designation is far more heterogeneous and includes certain kinds of poetry, comedy, and opera libretti. If the picaresque genre is defined in terms of common contents, topics and motifs, it comprises the drama and the theatre as well. It is significant that Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the first picaresque novel in Spain, already contains dramatic scenes and passages of dialogue. This extended and hybrid genre understanding of picaresque narrative legitimizes this essay’s approach, focusing on individual, thematic and formal elements which link the plot of Peer Gynt to the main features of picaresque literature.
My contribution deals with the changing aspects of the situation of "Waiting for ..." as a literary topie in the Scandinavian literaturę from Ibsen's "Peer Gynt" to Hjalmar Bergmans novel "Herr von Hancken" - with a subseąent outlook on the reuse of the motif in the time between the two world wars. The analysis of important works of Scandinavian Hterature during this period - including works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Lagerlof, Hj. Bergman, H. Aanrud - shows very clearly that the main characters as a conseąuence of the loss of the intended or expected object are inclined to transform their reality and thus replace the empty position of the object with the most phantastic projections of a secondary, artificiel world which has no similarity with the empirical world of common experience. On the contrary. Due to the subjecfs free disposal over the object-area it is possible for them to create a fictional world which approaches the world of madness and in which the authors are expressing the crisis and the solitude of human beeing under the conditions of modem society.