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)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-146789 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Hultenheim, Anna |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för kultur och estetik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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