Privileged, Hypocritical, and Complicit: Contemporary Scandinavian Literature and the Egalitarian Imagination
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Privileged, Hypocritical, and Complicit : Contemporary Scandinavian Literature and the Egalitarian Imagination. / Sharma, Devika.
I: Comparative Literature Studies, Bind 56, Nr. 4, 2019, s. 711-730.Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Privileged, Hypocritical, and Complicit
T2 - Contemporary Scandinavian Literature and the Egalitarian Imagination
AU - Sharma, Devika
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - 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?
AB - 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?
UR - http://muse.jhu.edu/article/742050
M3 - Journal article
VL - 56
SP - 711
EP - 730
JO - Comparative Literature Studies
JF - Comparative Literature Studies
SN - 0010-4132
IS - 4
ER -
ID: 212258364