| dc.description.abstract | This essay focuses on Karin Moe’s appropriation of French feminist theory in her debut collection, Kjønnskrift (Sextext 1980), and on how her appropriation is entangled with a gender-based rebellion against early surrealism. The collection was a subversive and provocative statement in Norwegian culture at the time of its publication. The highly conscious use of language – a combination of Nynorsk (New Norwegian, one of the two versions of written Norwegian) and dialect – also involved a distancing from the cultural establishment and from the centralised literary institutions in Norway. The combination of, on the one hand, a quite carnivalesque and provincial tone and, on the other, an extended use of intellectual references to philosophy and aesthetic theory creates an interesting dynamics. The intellectualisation of feminism in the works of Cixous and Irigaray is central for Moe, and her writings often belong somewhere between fiction and academic writing. I read the poem “Materaliensjon i bokstaveleg forstand” (Materalienation in the Literal Sense) from Kjønnskrift as a concrete reflection on the idea of feminine vs. masculine writing. | en_US |
