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Jorgen Dines Johansen. Litteratur og begar: Ti studier i dansk og norsk 1800-tals litteratur.

Article Excerpt
Jorgen Dines Johansen. Litteratur og begor: Ti studier i dansk og norsk 1800-tals litteratur. Odense: Syddansk UP, 2003. Pp.241.

This book engages the reader in dialogue; it is a learned, well-written, fetching"survey" of the 1800s. One may disagree with Dines Johansen's analyses--or part of them--but they involve the reader and offer enlightenment. He states that he is drawn to the literature of the nineteenth century because of his fascination with the emergence of the modern individual and the dissolution of previous ideologies. He focuses on the themes of sexuality and death and how they changed throughout the century. That literature deals with our--the readers'--desires and fears, and, thus, it engages us subjectively, for we desire and enjoy texts that deal with our desires. Dines Johansen strongly stresses that the reader is/must be profoundly involved with the texts (and in the analyses that follow his involvement is engagingly felt).

Dines Johansen wants to make clear where he stands as a critic, and clear he is. He wants to prepare the reader for what is to come, and he neatly combines his major orientation--psychoanalysis--with New Criticism, for with a well-chosen quotation from Freud, he lets the doctor from Vienna advise his followers that one should not listen to patients with preconceived notions but rather let the patients' own statements suggest the course that the analysis should take. If the psychoanalyst or literary critics apply well-known methodologies, they will merely register what they already know and not grasp the patient's/text's individuality. Common sense at work.

But, continues Dines Johansen, that rule is not easy to follow, for one cannot leave one's knowledge behind; the critic can never be a tabula rasa. With an awareness of that problem, one can, however, proceed because competent critics are good readers--well armed with methodological strategies--and because they know that the text will defeat those strategies and make the critic react and think anew (and, thus, become an even better reader). Such readers respect the complexity of the text and do not permit any and all interpretations (here I detect echoes of Umberto Eco). In short, do not expect simplistic analyses to follow!

Dines Johansen is a balanced and...

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