TY - JOUR

T1 - More than a Room

T2 - Variations on a Childhood Home in Klaus Rifbjerg

AU - Reeh, Henrik

N1 - Contribution to special issue on "Spatiality as interpretative approach to contemporary Scandinavian culture and literature", to be published in spring 2022

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - Klaus Rifbjerg (1931-2015) is the author of 150 books – a literary œuvre that stands out as a monument of post-war Danish welfare in a modernist middle-class version.While divorces soon split up many families and their homes, Rifbjerg’s childhood home remains intact from before his birth until the mid-1980s. Moreover, it is named in his writing spanning the lyrical début in 1956 and a book on architecture from 2008. This article explores four different contexts – poetry, memoirs, literary montage, essayism – in which Rifbjerg addresses his childhood home as a house. In particular, the study highlights the literary staging of his own room, including the bed. The individual room is central to the narrator’s childhood and adolescence. But it also represents a limited interiority that may be transgressed, and give way to new subjectivities, elsewhere. Later on, Rifbjerg keeps writing (on) his childhood house that he finally posits as a matrix of his aesthetic values and practices.

AB - Klaus Rifbjerg (1931-2015) is the author of 150 books – a literary œuvre that stands out as a monument of post-war Danish welfare in a modernist middle-class version.While divorces soon split up many families and their homes, Rifbjerg’s childhood home remains intact from before his birth until the mid-1980s. Moreover, it is named in his writing spanning the lyrical début in 1956 and a book on architecture from 2008. This article explores four different contexts – poetry, memoirs, literary montage, essayism – in which Rifbjerg addresses his childhood home as a house. In particular, the study highlights the literary staging of his own room, including the bed. The individual room is central to the narrator’s childhood and adolescence. But it also represents a limited interiority that may be transgressed, and give way to new subjectivities, elsewhere. Later on, Rifbjerg keeps writing (on) his childhood house that he finally posits as a matrix of his aesthetic values and practices.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - Klaus Rifbjerg (1931-2015)

KW - Danish Literature

KW - childhood home

KW - individual room

KW - bed

KW - Copenhagen

KW - Amager

M3 - Journal article

VL - 20

JO - Costellazioni. Rivista di lingue e letterature

JF - Costellazioni. Rivista di lingue e letterature

ER -