Privileged, Hypocritical, and Complicit: Contemporary Scandinavian Literature and the Egalitarian Imagination
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
Everyone knows what the predicament of privilege is: It is the awkward yet highly ordinary experience of one's privilege being a problem. I take the predicament of privilege to be a sensibility and an aesthetic that is central—but not exclusive—to contemporary Scandinavian culture. In this article, I examine one literary form taken by this predicament, which I call "hypocrisy literature." In Scandinavian hypocrisy literature, we meet a globally privileged subject that has come to identify itself as a global problem. According to this literature, the experience that turns one into a self-professed hypocrite is not the acknowledgment of one's own insincerity. Instead, it is the acknowledgment that sincerity will not save one from complicity. As I interpret it, hypocrisy literature is an aesthetic response to a specific historical situation in which the Nordic middle classes suspect that they live at the expense of others. But it is also a response, I suggest, to a development in collective ideas about what can constitute critique at all. That is one way to read hypocrisy literature: as a contemplation of what critique under conditions of complicity may or may not look like. Am I critical, this literature asks?
Original language | English |
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Journal | Comparative Literature Studies |
Volume | 56 |
Issue number | 4 |
Pages (from-to) | 711-730 |
ISSN | 0010-4132 |
Publication status | Published - 2019 |
Links
- https://muse.jhu.edu/article/742050
Final published version
ID: 212258364