From Poetry & Autobiography to Poetry & “Autothanatography”

Abstract

The project for this issue started in a questioning about the possible bridges between poetry today and Romantic poetry. How to think beyond the now consensual but also constructed oppositions that helped the Modernists define themselves against their anxiety-inducing immediate predecessors? In the line of Marjorie Perloff’s 21st-Century Modernism, one is urged to this re-reading of the 19th and of the 20th and 21st centuries. Thus comes to be examined one of the major post-Romantic assessmen..

«Jeg gjør nu ikke regning paa synderlig lang livsfrist.» Unaturlig narrativ og håp i Henrik Wergelands dødsleiedikt

“…The poem would then become not just a place in which the presupposed objectivity and sincerity of autobiography hold little currency, but also the very place where the drama of impossible objectivity and radical insincerity can be staged, played out, and systematized. (Aji 2007) En slik løsrivelse fra krav om sannhet og faktisitet, aktualiserer et reservoar av mulige skildringer av liv og helbred. Kanskje er det slik at Wergelands opplevelse av naer forestående død opphever de politiske, men også kunstneriske grenser han tidligere har befunnet seg innenfor.…”