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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)

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.