Knausgaard Gets the MLA Treatment
At last month's annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, Karl Ove Knausgaard's roughly 3,600-page autobiographical novel My Struggle earned its still-living author two dedicated sessions — the same tally the conference gave to Woolf and Melville. That is striking for a Norwegian writer who became well known outside his home country only a few years ago and whose final two volumes had not yet been published in English.
The sessions settled nothing. Peter Schwenger of Mount St. Vincent University argued that the author is working a gimmick and compared the current admiration to the fleeting reverence for Norman Mailer a generation ago. Espen Børdahl of Goethe University Frankfurt took the opposite view, predicting that a work this massive simply will not go away and that Knausgaard will become canonical. Inge van de Ven of Utrecht University called him “Proust for the Facebook generation,” noting that he spends sixteen lines on making tea and nine on the attacks of 9/11.
The venue added a wry footnote: the Knausgaard rooms were about half filled, while a packed session on the Anthropocene and deep time in literary studies drew the bigger crowd. Whatever the eventual verdict on the author, the conference offered a live demonstration of how academic criticism absorbs — and sometimes resists — a famous writer who is still breathing.
Why Scholars Can't Agree on Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Two Knausgaards on Display
What made the sessions unusual was not merely the author's pulse but the split among the people who study him. Schwenger, whose paper was largely laudatory, still doubts the writing has enough layers to endure. Børdahl, an unabashed fan, found the long Hitler essay in the final Norwegian volume tiresome yet went further in the other direction, betting on canonization. The same work produced directly contradictory professional judgments, and each presenter seemed aware they were guessing.
A Canon Question Wrapped in a Title
Børdahl centered his paper on what he called the potentially distasteful act of recycling the twentieth century's most notorious book title: Min Kamp deliberately echoes Mein Kampf. That the question of whether borrowing that title was offensive could anchor an academic presentation, rather than end the conversation, shows how far Knausgaard scholarship has moved from simple judgment of the man.
Going Big Versus Going Granular
Van de Ven and Peter Sjølyst-Jackson of Birmingham City University both read Knausgaard as a chronicler of the trivial — details that surface only to come to nothing, the way they do in life. This sits uneasily beside the broader patterns visible at the same conference, where a forum on time in Harold Pinter's plays and a paper linking Joan Didion's grief memoir to Black Lives Matter pulled in opposite directions. The Knausgaard papers traveled both ways at once, placing him amid social media and the German republication of Mein Kampf while arguing over the translation of a single adjective describing strawberry fields. That distance — from the molecular to the epochal, often inside one paper — appears to be the working condition of literary studies today, for better and worse.
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