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This dissertation centres on the long poem alfabet by Danish poet Inger Christensen. Dealing with the threat of nuclear disaster as well as the risk of chemical contamination, this poem has often been quoted as a precursor to the wave of ecopoetry in the Scandinavian literature of the 2010s. While there have been a few previous attempts to study Christensen’s poetry within the framework of ecocriticism, no study has hitherto investigated the significance and relevance of labeling alfabet as a work of ecopoetry, nor what contemporary ecopoetry inherits and transmits from Christensen’s poem. It is the aim of this study to disclose how Christensen conjures up an ecopoetic response to global crises, as well as how the ecopoetry of the 21st century responds to her poem. The method of the investigation is inspired by the centrality of interconnectivity for ecological thinking, as well as the affirmative and creative sensibility of postcritique. Through close reading combined with exploration of intertextual connections, this thesis interprets and discusses alfabet from an ecocritical point of view, while concurrently asking what contributions the poem can make to the development of ecocritical theory and the subfield of ecopoetics. From this interplay between theory and poetic praxis, the key questions of this thesis emerge: How does Christensen’s work with poetic form illuminate ecocritical issues regarding the relation between language and world? Can incantation be understood as an ecopoetic strategy? What kind of subject is conjured up in alfabet, and in what relation does it stand to the more-than-human world? How does Christensen deal with the pervasive trope of apocalyptism as a way of representing global crises? In what ways do some of the ecopoetic texts of the 2000s reinterpret alfabet, and do these poems in turn shed new light upon Christensen’s poem? Furthermore, the similarities and differences between a romantic and a postmodern ecology are explored through the thesis’ attempts at syncretising two strands of research on Christensen’s poetry. The first four chapters analyse and discuss alfabet from different points of view, utilising divergent theoretical and intertextual approaches, while the fifth chapter examines a selection of poems by Ida Börjel, Agnar Lirhus and Juliana Spahr. I argue that alfabet belongs to the tradition of organic formalism, as Christensen’s use of formal play is intertwined with and dependent upon a view of nature as creative and self-organising. Furthermore, I suggest that rhythm should be a central concept of ecopoetics – not only because of the enchanting effects of incantation, but also because rhythm is the most bodily function of language: it is what connects bodies to each other, including the human body to more-than-human ones. Regarding the difficult but pervasive ecopoetical question of what poetry can do for us in times of global crisis, I suggest that reading poems such as alfabet is, among many other things, a way of exercising one’s capability of dealing with uncertainties and doubt – a lesson in how to meet the mysteries of a diverse and unstable more-than-human world.

This dissertation examines precision as an aesthetic concept and practice in texts by Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969), Inger Christensen (1935–2009) and Herta Müller (1953–). Although often referred to in contemporary criticism as a marker of aesthetic value, precision in literature has rarely been the subject of academic study. The dissertation relates the meaning of precision in literature to its meaning in and for the natural sciences and takes the conceptual dependence of the former on the latter as its point of departure. It presupposes a connection between scientific or mathematical precision and the concept of nihilism, and, in a further step, makes the claim that modern literary precision should be viewed in light of a history fraught by nihilistic destruction. Two poetological texts by the poet Paul Celan (1920–1970) are identified as places where the concept of precision in its double function – both scientific/nihilistic and literary/poetic – is explicated in a historically decisive way. Together, they are construed as an interpretative frame for the subsequent readings of Gombrowicz, Christensen and Müller. The idea of “the zero point” as a point of orientation for literary precision is mapped out by way of an interpretation of Celan’s notion of “the date”. Literary precision is presented as a form of sensibility, determined by and determining sensible particulars, rather than general and abstract rules. The close readings of Gombrowicz, Christensen and Müller, focus on formative passages in each of the writer’s works where such sensibility is brought to the fore. Each reading is structured around a trope – the antinomy in the case of Gombrowicz, the chiasm in the case of Christensen and the simile in the case of Müller. All three are shown to reflect the act of precision in practice, express its guiding sensibility and demonstrate that it is paradoxical in nature – it can, so it is argued, ultimately be understood as a precision of the imprecise.

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.