Abstract
This chapter analyses Knut Hamsun’s autobiographical work, On Overgrown Paths, in order to examine how a disputed past and controversial actions are addressed in life writing, and the role played by forgetting where it becomes a central rhetorical device in dealing with the past. In this short text a convergence of different elements of forgetting come together: the natural forgetting of the aging process, the voice of a man at odds with the politics of the day and thereby memory politics, attempting to represent his version of the past, in a meandering and fragmented text which does not provide the solace his readers craved.
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Notes
- 1.
Tony Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,’ Daedalus 121.4 (Fall 1992): 83–118, p. 85.
- 2.
Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country,’ p. 85.
- 3.
Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country,’ p. 85.
- 4.
Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country,’ p. 89–90.
- 5.
Anne Sabo, ‘Knut Hamsun in Paa gjengrodde stier: Joker, Übermensch, or Sagacious Madman?’ Scandinavian Studies 71.4 (Winter 1999): 453–474, p. 453.
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Susanne Maerz, ‘Okkupasjonstidens lange skygger,’ Nytt Nordisk Tidsskrift 24.4 (2007): 365–377, p. 365.
- 7.
Maerz, ‘Okkupasjonstidens lange skygger,’ pp. 366–372.
- 8.
Bjarte Bruland and Mats Tangestuen, ‘The Norwegian Holocaust: Changing Views and Representations,’ Scandinavian Journal of History 36.5 (2011): 587–604, p. 593.
- 9.
Bruland and Tangestuen, ‘The Norwegian Holocaust,’ p. 593.
- 10.
Bruland and Tangestuen, ‘The Norwegian Holocaust,’ p. 598.
- 11.
Jay Winter, ‘Thinking about silence,’ Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, eds. Efrat Ben-Ze‘ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 3–31, p. 5.
- 12.
Paul Connerton, ‘Seven types of forgetting,’ Memory Studies 1 (2008): 59-71, p. 67.
- 13.
Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, trans. Steven Rendall (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 159.
- 14.
Tore Rem, Knut Hamsun: Reisen til Hitler (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2014), pp. 26–27.
- 15.
Rem, Knut Hamsun, p. 145.
- 16.
Rem, Knut Hamsun, pp. 356–357.
- 17.
Aleida Assmann, ‘To remember or to Forget: Which Way Out of a Shared History of Violence?’ Memory and Political Change, eds. Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 53–71, p. 57.
- 18.
Assmann, ‘To remember or to Forget,’ p. 59.
- 19.
Assmann, ‘To remember or to Forget,’ p. 61.
- 20.
Sabo, ‘Knut Hamsun in Paa gjengrodde stier,’ p. 454.
- 21.
Knut Hamsun, On Overgrown Paths, trans. Carl L. Anderson (New York: Paul S. Eriksson, 1967), p. 3.
- 22.
Alan Rosen, ‘Autobiography from the Other Side: The Reading of Nazi Memoirs and Confessional Ambiguitiy,’ Biography 24.3 (Summer 2001): 553–569, p. 555.
- 23.
Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country,’ p. 90.
- 24.
Rosen, ‘Autobiography from the Other Side,’ p. 556.
- 25.
Monika Žagar, Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), p. 216.
- 26.
Žagar, Knut Hamsun, p. 217.
- 27.
Žagar, Knut Hamsun, p. 222.
- 28.
Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country,’ p. 92.
- 29.
Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country,’ p. 95.
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Gudmundsdottir, G. (2017). Forgetting as Disguise: Memory Debates of Occupation. In: Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59864-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59864-6_6
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