Join Scandinavian Studies editor Dean Krouk on Tuesday December 5, 2023 at 10 am CST (17:00 CET) for a conversation with author and scholar Claus Elholm Andersen about his upcoming book Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård's six-volume, 3600-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle, has been widely hailed for its heroic exploration of selfhood, compulsive readability, and restless experimentation with form and genre. Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel explains why. Across four chapters, Claus Elholm Andersen shows how Knausgård confronts, challenges, and rejects the symbiotic relationship between novels and fiction, particularly via a technique of "auto-fictionalization." The fifth chapter then explores the further breakdown of this relationship in autofiction by Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner, taking readers to what Lerner called "the very edge of fiction."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Claus Elholm Andersen is Paul and Renate Madsen Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Do you have a book you would like to nominate? Nominations should be new or upcoming releases in the field of Scandinavian Studies. The author will, ideally, be a member in good standing of SASS. Nominations will be accepted from any SASS member, including the author themself. Please email the author's name, contact information, book title, and a brief (200 word) description of the text to sassbooktalk@scandinavianstudy.org. Nominations will be accepted on a rolling basis.