A new criticism

What is the task and object of literary criticism in the 21st century? Which aspects of the literary text should a qualified reading focus on? How can literature engage critically in the general social debate? And what is the purpose of reading literature anyway?

These are the questions 12 literati from Denmark, Norway and Sweden try to answer in this book. Based on the entry of the Anglo-Saxon new criticism into research and teaching in literature in Scandinavia in the middle of the 20th century, current perspectives on and issues related to the work of academics, students and writers with literature are discussed.

Along the way, a number of fundamental aspects of literature teaching are addressed, including the reasons for letting medical students read fiction, the relationship between song lyrics and printed poems, literature's contribution to the debate on current social crises and much more.

CONTENTS
Mats Jansson
Bengt Holmqvist, the new critic and FJ Billeskov Jansen

Michael Kallesøe Schmidt
The instrumentalization of new criticism.
Literary pedagogical debate in the 1960s

Marianne Stidsen
The private detective as a role model.
The long-term sustainability of the phenomenological and hermeneutic method

Stefan Kjerkegaard and Dan Ringgaard
How writers read.
A contribution to post criticism with readings in Karl Ove Knausgård's
My struggle and Christina Hesselholdt's Society

Anne-Marie May
Empathic reading.
On the use of poetry in narrative medicine

Ole Karlsen
The lyric poem, the song and the object of lyric criticism

Anchor Gemzøe
On the station.
Sensation and abstraction with a view to the station
as modernist chronotope

Jens Lohfert Jørgensen
Bacteria (and viruses) in contemporary Danish literature

Unni Langås
Poetry in times of crisis.
Four poems about July 22

Hans Kristian S. Rustad
The refugee crisis now!
On interactional strategies in Peter-Clement Woetmanns
Behind the hills, the coast. A lament

Louise Mønster
The philosophy of prepositions.
About Morten Chemnitz's view of the world of words