Abstract The Poetics of Care – A Reading of Inger Christensen’s Brev i april   The Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935-2009) is considered to be one of the late 20th Century’s most important poets, not only in Scandinavia but also internationally. Christensen’s poetic works have been translated into a number of different languages, and for several years she was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Christensen made her debut in 1962 with a collection of poems, Lys, shortly followed by Græs (1963). In 1969 she had her breakthrough as a poet with det. In addition to her six collections of poems, that apart from the works mentioned above in­clude Brev i april (1979), alfabet (1981) and Sommerfugledalen (1990), Christensen also wrote novels, essays, children’s books and drama.          This paper aims to be the first profound analysis of Brev i april taking into account the close intertwining between structure and content, significant in the oeuvre of Christensen, having at its core, in this her fourth collection of poems, the poetics of Care. The method is based on Martin Heidegger’s notion of Sorge, “Care”, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception in the concept of intertwining, the Chiasm, emanating from Dasein’s being-in-the-world belonging to Heidegger, together with the ancient myth of Cura and the motif mother – child, prevalent throughout the everydayness that constitutes the narrative frame of Brev i april. Through an interplay of close reading of Christensen’s poem and the texts of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and the myth of Cura, illuminating certain aspects connected to the notion of Care, the analysis leads up to an understanding of the widened and nuanced poetics of Care that permeates Brev i april. The paper is completed with a part including language and intertextuality, a way of extending the notion of Care belonging to Christensen, where language and world are woven together, and dependent upon one another.     (keywords: Inger Christensen, Brev i april, Martin Heidegger, care, everydayness, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, intertwining, Gunnar Ekelöf, language, intertextuality)

A paranoid and shameful reading of Inger Christensens novel Azorno.The contagious feelings of paranoia and shame played a vital part in my first reading of the novel Azorno, written by the Danish poet Inger Christensen. In this essay, I’m letting those emotions direct the ‘understanding’ and analysis of the novel. In earlier research the focus has been to comprehend what the novel ‘really is about’, and even though it has been mentioned that the form probably is a way to make the reader a visible constructer of  the novel’s ‘meaning’ the understanding has never been created by the affects that occurs during the reading. In doing so, I mean, a new and more subversive ‘understanding’  of Azorno is possible. Azornos is a quite peculiar novel which form builds upon an ambivalence, where the reader never can distinguish true from false, fiction from reality. This ambivalence is caused through the change of narrator that takes place in each chapter. The Chapters are first shaped as letters, where four women discuss who is the one that really knows Azorno, and then as notes, that seem to come from a diary and concerns the writing of a novel. The uncertainty increases when the earlier narrator is accused by the next one of being a liar, something that happens in every letter. In the notes the first narrator is told to be the pseudonym of the next one and so it continues. Thus the reader get the feeling of not knowing who the true narrator is – or if there is one. The accusations of lying and the paranoid attitude are contagious to the reader who gets the feeling that the text and its narrators are not to be trusted. Another affect shaping the text is shame, caused by the text’s seductiveness. The reader is held in the violence of the text by constantly searching for the truth but also repeatedly being deprived the delightful taste of it. At the same time, the reader is also starting to shamefully enjoy the feeling of being fooled by the text. In the article, I will use the theory of paranoia offered by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Sedgwick understands paranoia as nothing different from knowledge per se and as a feeling that, when it’s shared, can be a useful in theories aiming to understand and deconstruct power. The positive consequences of acknowledging paranoia while reading is according to Sedgwick understood as something that, if it is taken seriously,  also can be a way to move towards possibilities and reparation. By embracing the strong and negative feeling of paranoia, the reader, I argue, has the opportunity to, together with the text, construct another narrative about the seducer Azorno – which is the name of the main character of the novel– and, the perhaps five, women who might be his mistresses.  When adding the acknowledgment of shame and using the theory of shame as a emotional power of keeping ’things in it’s ”right” place’, but also a feeling that – if it is shared – can work in opposite direction, since shame seen as a important experience also can make normative ideas visible. By admitting and sharing the shame sensed during the reading of Azorno, normative ideas regarding the relationship between the reader and the text, as well as standard ideas about mistresses and seducers, becomes visible and therefore also brought to a possible change. Thus, in the ending of the novel a new affect – more exultant – is achieved in the relationship between the reader and Azorno.

This dissertation investigates different sorts of repetition in the text ”Watersteps” and the four central lyrical works of the Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935–2009), it, Letter in April, alphabet and Butterfly Valley. The poems are analysed through close reading against a backdrop of the philosophical investigations of repetition by Søren Kierkegaard, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida as well as the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the lifeworld philosophy of the late Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Inger Christensen is known for constructing different systems as framework for her texts. Repetition is a dominant element in these systems, and in her texts repetition is pervading  in her prose as well as in her poetry. The repetitions have important functions structuring the texts and creating new meanings. Using a term of Novalis you could say that they function as tools of a writer who is ”inspired by language” (”ein Sprachbrgeisterter”). The repetitions are literal (or just slightly changed) and thematical. They are nearly always not just a repetition of a former expression or theme. The investigation shows that something new is produced in the process of repeating. While repetition pushes expressions and themes forward in the texts, the signification and meaning of these are changed at the same time. The process often includes displacement and condensation supplying the text with never ending possibilities of creating new relations and new meanings. The combination of system, repetition, and the meaning of the text shows the relationship between subject, world and language. They are independent phenomena at the same time as they are deeply involved in each other. The constant interaction and the tension between them are demonstrated in the texts both formally and semantically. Reality is suspended between them in eternal mobility; identity becomes relative. The living subject is defining and redefining itself by being part of the world mediated to it through language, and these two are in turn constantly redefined in the process of repetition. In this way the subject, and certainly the poet subject, is always expressing the world or, in reversed order, the world expresses itself through the subject.