Vol. 2, No. 1, 2010

ISSN 1949-8519 (Print)
ISSN 2154-6711 (Online)
April 2010

ISSN 1949-8519 (Print)

ISSN 2154-6711 (Online)

April 2010

Vol. 2, No. 1, 2010

ISSN 1949-8519 (Print)

ISSN 2154-6711 (Online)

April 2010

Overview:

This issue of Forum for World Literature Studies presents a comprehensive exploration of Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic legacy alongside broader cross-cultural literary and philosophical inquiries. The collection examines Ibsen’s plays—including A Doll’s House, The Lady from the Sea, John Gabriel Borkman, and The Wild Duck—through lenses such as ethical literary criticism, modern tragedy, deep ecology, gender politics, ritual symbolism, and dramaturgy. It highlights global adaptations and receptions in China, Finland, Russia, Mozambique, and beyond, demonstrating Ibsen’s enduring relevance to debates on freedom, identity, modernization, and women’s rights. Comparative studies connect Ibsen with figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, while other essays address Taoist and Confucian philosophy, child custody discourse, minority representation in Norwegian theatre, and political aesthetics in Langston Hughes’s poetry. Collectively, the volume underscores literature’s vital role in negotiating cultural transformation, existential responsibility, and social critique, affirming world literature as a dynamic space for intercultural dialogue and renewed interpretations of modernity.

Peer Gynt’s Boundary Crossings: The Global Map of His Empirical and Mental Journeys

Knut Brynhildsvoll

Peer Gynt spends most of his life in the airy atmosphere of dreams and fairy tales. He constantly crosses different kinds of real and mental borderlines. In my article I concentrate on three central motifs of the play, which have clear symbolic significations in the original cultural context, and examine the problems one is faced with when using the same images in Chinese productions of the play.

The Lady from the Sea: Emergence from Marine Unconscious to Awakened Living

Rakesh Mohan Sharma

The article attempts to explore Ellida’s search for freedom in the perspective of humanistic psychology. She moves from phases of simple innocence, rebellion, and ordinary consciousness of the self to creative consciousness, which she realizes only after the establishment of an adult‑adult relationship with the Stranger and Dr. Wangel. In her journey of life, as long as the Lady from the Sea (Ellida) remains a mermaid in the child‑child mode or parent‑child mode, she continues to oscillate between the forces of progression and regression. The moment she develops an adult perspective on reality through productive orientation toward life, the mermaid in Ellida’s mind dies and motherhood in Ellida takes birth. Therefore, by choosing Dr. Wangel, she hopes to fulfill all her needs—the need for identity, relatedness, rootedness, and transcendence. It is through this psychosynthesis that she is able to stand as an awakening human being, fully free and fully responsible.

Discord and Harmony between Human and Nature: An Ecological Interpretation of The Lady from the Sea

Dai Danni

The Lady from the Sea is one of Ibsen’s symbolic and romantic works in his late years. In this play, Ibsen does not simply advocate to “returning to nature” as Rousseau used to do. He has deeper thinking on the same issue. The core problems that Ibsen focuses on in The Lady from the Sea include the following: How can human beings really achieve harmony between human and nature? How can they really find out the spiritual home where they can calm down their souls? Or how can the sea become sea and the nature become the nature? These forward‑looking questions are given much attention in the twenty‑first century. Ibsen’s answer is as follows: Before human beings obtain real freedom and real love, and realize themselves in true love, the sea does not belong to human beings, while the nature is not humanized, either. They must realize that neither the sea nor nature belongs to them. Only true love can create harmony between human and nature and provide a home where they can have their souls released.

Periphery and Tragedy: Ibsen and the Emergence of a Literary Form

Leonardo F. Lisi

This paper challenges the claim that there can be no such thing as a modern tragedy by offering a new interpretation of the structure of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. On the one hand, the events of this play are governed by the actions of characters who cannot help but act in accordance with a subjective determination, autonomous of all external considerations. On the other hand, these characters time and again reveal themselves as bound by external laws that exceed their control. The opposition between these two principles goes through a number of dialectic turns, which makes the play’s tragic conflict center on the impossibility of determining which of these principles ultimately governs the construction of its meaning. Significantly, this dialectic mirrors what Kierkegaard, twenty years earlier, predicted would constitute the structure of modern tragedy—where the conflict no longer rests on the fact that a necessary order opposes the hero, but on the question of whether such an order even exists. The paper concludes by arguing that the emergence of such a new conception of tragedy in Scandinavia during the nineteenth century is a product of its specific position at the cultural and economic periphery of the world‑system. It is the movement of literary forms across different cultural contexts, then, that makes possible the birth of a new literary form.

Ibsen’s Use of Holy Days: An Amalgam of Philosophy, Poetry, and Religion

Trausti Ólafsson

The article discovers how Ibsen makes use of mythological elements in ten of his plays, simultaneously relating them to “holydays” or religious festivities from three different traditions. This includes an interpretation of the significance of Easter in Emperor and Galilean (1873), then focusing on how other Christian feasts remain in the background of Ibsen’s theatre: St. John’s Day in Brand (1866); Pentecost in Peer Gynt (1867); and Christmas in A Doll’s House (1879). This is followed by showing how two Ibsen plays, The Wild Duck (1884) and Rosmersholm (1886), draw on significant commemorations and ritualistic observances from the Jewish religion. It will then be traced how three of Ibsen’s plays relate to the Eleusinian Mysteries, an antiquity among the best known of all celebrations of the Magna Mater. Written with an interval of almost exactly two years between them, these plays are: The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), and The Master Builder (1892). Following the discussion of pagan mysteries in Ibsen, the paper refers to the concept of the Day of the Resurrection of the Flesh as a dramaturgic device in When We Dead Awaken (1899). To conclude, it is suggested that Neoplatonic philosophy—well known to Ibsen after his studies of Julian the Apostate—is a constant resource to the amalgam of philosophy, poetry, and religion in the Ibsen cycle.

The Use of the Gun and the Myth of Freedom

Sabiha Huq

In A Doll’s House Nora has admonished a life lived through hypocrisy and falsehood, and consequently her departure from that life has been the most crucial point. In the twenty‑first century Nora still retains the position of an administrator of shocking revelations, sometimes through directorial extravaganza—as in Thomas Ostermeier’s Nora at the Schaubühne, in which Nora does not slam the door on her husband but rather shoots him dead. Nora’s reinvention in the new European context reveals something about the male imagination, namely that it loves to play with female objects devoid of realities and possibilities. This technique of playing with the femme fatale has made playwrights and directors popular, and it is becoming customary outside the West too. The Centre for Asian Theatre’s Resurrection is an example, with the last scene presenting Irene chasing and knocking Rubek down with a gun. The paper intends to critique the myth of freedom projected through the use of the gun in these two productions, suggesting that emancipation of women remains a far cry because they are still seen and projected through the authority of men’s desires.

Ibsen’s Compass: Points of Dread and Desire

Anne‑Charlotte Hanes Harvey

By studying the emotional charge of the extended virtual milieu in Ibsen’s last twelve plays as a body, patterns are revealed which contribute significantly to the plays’ analysis, interpretation, mise‑en‑scène, and performance. The “here”—the virtual space evoked on stage—in Ibsen’s mature dramas is easily identified and falls within a fairly limited range (the plays are all set in contemporary Norway, largely in private spaces, and—with the exception of The Wild Duck—in separated dwellings rather than apartment buildings). But the “there”—the extended virtual milieu—is far more extensive, and reaches in all directions of the compass. This extended sphere includes not only specific places found on a geographical map (Paris, America, the Alps) but also vaguely defined areas or general directions (“the sea,” “the north”). Specific or general, they are not so much physical as mental and spiritual loci, assigned certain qualities evoking strong emotional responses. They exert a power to attract or repel. No analysis of Ibsen’s plays is complete without an understanding of this spatial “push and pull,” these compass points of dread and desire. Although some of them have been noted in individual plays, the patterns and congruences emerging by studying the entire cycle give greater weight to each instance and focus attention on hitherto unnoticed riches in Ibsen’s text.

Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Bengali Representations of When We Dead Awaken and The Wild Duck in Bengal

Tapati Gupta

This article concentrates on two recent Bengali productions of Ibsen: When We Dead Awaken (Punorujjibon – new life) and The Wild Duck (Dulali – literally, daughter, here the name of the wild duck; hence the identification with Hedvig is made). Both were first produced in 2006. For the source material for this article I had to depend on the directors’ scripts since the translated and adapted texts are not available in print. I must acknowledge my debt to the respective directors, Amalesh Chakraborti and Suranjana Dasgupta for access to the scripts and for enabling me to watch the performances. The first is more or less a faithful translation while the second is a condensed adaptation which is also an interesting excursion into the intra‑cultural. The negotiation of sociocultural differences through strategies of intercultural theatre will be the thrust of the discourse. Although Amalesh Chakraborty, the translator‑director of When We Dead Awaken, is more or less faithful to the original English text, the nuances of the poetic rhythm of the Bengali language naturally create differences that are inevitable. Moreover, there is the added responsibility of making the Bengali version stageworthy and socioculturally acceptable to an “other” culture. “Playability” and “speakability,” or rather a “playable speakability,” are important criteria of drama translation. He has, “out of practical necessity,” edited and omitted certain passages and scenes. One of the main reasons for the director to keep to the original Ibsen is because he felt that the characters, especially a knife‑wielding Irene, may not be acceptable to a Bengali audience. The problem could perhaps be solved by trying to maintain the western ambience. Also the artist‑model relationship as problematized in Ibsen is alien to Indian middle‑class reality. Hence a transcultural production has been attempted. The irony is however that he has effected a major change through the mise‑en‑scène of the conclusion and his approach to the figure of the Deaconess. Such changes are perhaps aimed to inscribe a foreign play into the Indian cultural context and introduce a free and alternate readability in an otherwise faithful translation.

Ibsen in the Globalized Society: Multiculturalism—or the Lack Thereof—in Norwegian Ibsen Performance

Lixian Cheng

This paper discusses Ibsen performance in a contemporary Norwegian context. Despite popular stereotypes of ethnic and cultural homogeneity, Norway is in reality a multicultural society. This multicultural reality, however, has been slow to penetrate Norwegian Ibsen performance, with actors of minority background rarely seen in Ibsen productions. The paper investigates the reasons behind the underrepresentation of multicultural actors in Norwegian Ibsen performance as well as in Norwegian institutional theatre performance in general, focusing on notions of realism, conceptions of Ibsen in Norway, and the structures behind the Norwegian theatre system.

Intercultural Implications of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House: Experiences with a Production in Mozambique

Helge Rønning

The point of departure for this paper is a discussion of the 2006 production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at Teatro Avenida in Maputo, Mozambique. The article consists of reflections on the adaptation processes from one historical and cultural setting—Europe in the late nineteenth century—to Mozambique in the early twenty‑first century. The focus is not so much on adaptations as such, but on an attempt to reflect on how a play like A Doll’s House, where gender roles are central, may provide a theoretical model for how modern societies have changed their perceptions of the relationship between men and women. The adaptation of the play in a particular African context serves as a springboard for principal reflections on what interculturalism implies in relation to dramatic and literary works.

The Making of a World Dramatist: Ibsen and Det Norske Theater

Tanya Thresher

This article assesses the roles played by the city of Bergen and Det Norske Theater in making Ibsen a world dramatist by examining the cross‑cultural influences the twenty‑three‑year‑old Ibsen encountered there. In codifying Bergen and Det Norske Theater as spaces that permit a transgression of the national into the international, the article suggests both spaces as valuable points of departure for mapping Ibsen across nations and cultures.

Post‑Perestroika Receptions in Staging Ibsen

Margarita Odesskaya

The last ten years have displayed a growth of interest in the plays of Ibsen in Russia, with a great number of performances both in the main cities and in the provinces. I will consider two Moscow stagings—Sergey Kutasov’s (Pillars of Society) and Migdauš Karbauskis’s (Hedda Gabler). I will also review two St. Petersburg productions: Hedda Gabler directed by Vladislav Pazi, and Michael Bychkov’s Nora; as well as two provincial productions directed by Vladimir Ageev. My aim is to present the picture of new interpretations of Ibsen’s drama on the Russian modern stage.

The Theme of “Discussion”: Ibsen, Shaw, and Ding Xilin Compared

Sun Jian

Ibsen’s plays, especially his social plays, are known for the theme of discussion, which, according to Shaw, marks a technical novelty and a departure from the traditional well‑made play of Scribe. Shaw was a great admirer of Ibsen and also a practitioner of the so‑called “Ibsenism.” His discussion plays are highly subversive in terms of their political and moral purposes. Shaw in turn influenced Ding Xilin, who wrote many plays in the early twentieth century in the style of Ibsen and Shaw by employing the idea of discussion in his dramas. This paper will examine how the three playwrights use the idea of discussion in their plays and explain why discussion plays were so popular in their respective situations.

The Role of Women in the Reception of Ibsen in Finland in the 1880s and 1890s

H. K. Riikonen

Before the First World War, Finland produced an astonishing number of theatre performances of Ibsen’s plays as well as critical studies and essays on his works. Alongside great actresses such as Ida Aalberg, female critics and writers played an important role in Ibsen’s reception in Finland at the end of the nineteenth century. The most important female critic in Finland to write about Ibsen was Irene Leopold. In the 1890s she presented Ibsen and modern Scandinavian literature in the periodical Finsk Tidskrift (in Swedish). Leopold reviewed The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken, and discussed Georg Brandes’s views about Ibsen. Like many other critics of that time, she was also interested in Bjørnson. The leading woman writer in Finland in the 1880s and 1890s was Minna Canth. Her plays and stories were in many respects influenced by Ibsen. They also raised a great deal of critical discussion, which was clearly connected with the ideological debate around Ibsen and his works.

Misinterpretation and Innovation: Receptions of A Doll’s House during the May Fourth Movement in China

Chen Liang

As an emancipating cultural movement, the May Fourth Movement marked a dramatic shift in Chinese national ideology and Chinese playwriting. Ibsenism, upon its introduction into China, played a leading role in this cultural renovation. The reception of Ibsenism was, to a large extent, localized and, in that particular situation, politicized to meet the requirements of Chinese intellectuals seeking to launch a revolution in the social sphere. Thus, misinterpretation of Ibsenism was inevitable. Although it failed to capture the complexity of the aesthetic value of Ibsenism, it effectively shaped the realism of Chinese playwriting in the twentieth century and laid a solid foundation for the development of modernity in Chinese drama.

Playbird or Featherbrain?

May‑Brit Akerholt

Translation does not merely involve a linguistic interpretation but also a dramaturgical interrogation, including cultural and dramatic traditions in both the source language and the target language texts. “Mistranslation” does not simply mean choosing a “wrong” word. A single word may change characterization and interpretation. Henrik Ibsen coined the word “spillefugl” for Nora, with its ambiguous suggestions of “play,” “gamble,” and “perform.” The word has often been translated as “feather‑brain” or “spendthrift,” or other derogatory expressions that alter Torvald’s attitude toward Nora and the game they play together, thereby affecting productions in English. This article discusses the implications of translation choices in A Doll’s House, with particular reference to Australian productions.

A Doll’s House and Kramer vs. Kramer: Objections to Family Law

Bjarne Markussen

Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and Robert Benton’s film Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) are two of the most significant family dramas in Western culture. Not only because they deal with fundamental family relations, but because they challenge the legal boundaries for these relations. It could be argued that both dramas have had an impact on Western family law. The article will compare A Doll’s House and Kramer vs. Kramer with regards to both existential and legal themes. Both Nora and Ted make existential choices. She chooses freedom before her duties as a mother and wife. He gives up his personal freedom to be with his son. The ties between them are strong, and being a “weekend daddy” is no longer an option. He chooses love and parental duties before freedom, and his position is therefore more like Mrs. Linde’s, who needs “someone and something to work for.” Legally speaking, A Doll’s House presents a critic of several basic assumptions in nineteenth‑century family law which subordinated the wife to the husband. Kramer vs. Kramer, on the other hand, represents a critique of twentieth‑century child custody court which subordinated fathers to mothers as childcarers. The common target for these critical efforts is the Enlightenment theory of motherhood.

Meeting Points of Ibsen and Rabindranath

Kazal Krishna Banerjee

One point sometimes needs to be made during Ibsen‑discussion on behalf of Bangladesh, about how the struggle for national independence here started out of a historic language movement that took place in 1952. One major related truth is that “from the first, Ibsen was associated with cultural independence, particularly as a result of his appointment as resident dramatist and later director at the Norske Teater” (Innes 7). Henrik Ibsen’s role is thus clearly comparable to that of Rabindranath and other literary greats of nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century Bengal; for, by “choosing to write his poems and plays in Norwegian,” Ibsen “was making a political statement” (Innes 8). In this article, I compare historical details surrounding these two parallels as well as the cultural and political roles that both Ibsen and Rabindranath played. My main focus will be on parallels and correspondences between Rabindranath and Henrik Ibsen, their joint relevance, and its implication for some debates in theory.

Tracie Utoh‑Ezeajugh’s Nneora: An African Doll’s House as a Paradigm

Alex C. Asigbo

In theorizing adaptation, revisions and or translations, scholars have always been of the opinion that every adaptation or translation is an original in its own authentic sense. It is on that basis that we see adaptations as serving as a bridge between two cultures. Ibsen’s works as universal masterpieces lend themselves to revisions and reinterpretations across cultural lines, for the themes of his works have always revolved around “the struggle for integrity; the conflict between duty to oneself and duty to others.” One playwright who finds parallels in Ibsen’s works that can be interrogated for cross‑cultural dialogue is Tracie Chima Utoh‑Ezeajugh, an up‑and‑coming Nigerian playwright. Utoh‑Ezeajugh’s adaptation of A Doll’s House into Nneora: an African Doll’s House is here examined to discover the extent to which it has served to expose uniformities between Scandinavia of Ibsen’s day and the Africa (Nigeria) of Utoh‑Ezeajugh’s day.

The Biographers’ Tale of Ibsen’s Childhood

Jens‑Morten Hanssen

At fifty‑two years old Henrik Ibsen began to work on a book in the autobiographic genre. The text ended up as a fragment with ten pages of childhood memories. Ibsen’s most recent biographer, Ivo de Figueiredo, deconstructs the text and turns it into a key source for his biographic project. “Perhaps the entire description is a lie,” says Figueiredo; at any rate, it is literature and in this respect a prelude to Ibsen’s later poetic calling. This article explores how seven Ibsen biographers—Henrik Jæger, Edmund Gosse, Gerhard Gran, Halvdan Koht, Michael Meyer, Robert Ferguson, and Ivo de Figueiredo—address Ibsen’s childhood memories. What function and role do they acquire in the biographers’ presentations of Ibsen’s childhood? This phase of his life is poorly documented, and several biographers resort to ingrained myths. Few, except Figueiredo, are struck by the strong signs of literary construction in Ibsen’s text.

Preface to The Interplay Between Art and Politics: A Study of Langston Hughes’s Poetry

Nie Zhenzhao

The dissertation of Luo Lianggong explores the interplay of politics and artistry embodied in the poetry of Langston Hughes, the great African American poet of the twentieth century. It is composed of six parts, focusing on the relationships between Hughes’s political consciousness and theme, subject matter, artistic point of view, and artistic form, in order to examine the interplay between politics and art as well as the different modes of this relationship across decades. It is characterized by three features. The first lies in its focus on the interplay of politics and artistry—the main line of the dissertation—developed through sustained exploration. The second is its diachronic and synchronic structure, organized in accordance with the theme. The third is its insistence on combining theories with textual analysis.

Classic of China, Treasure of the World: Review on The History of Japanese Research on The Book of Ancient Chinese Poem

Liu Jiuling

The History of Japanese Research on The Book of Ancient Chinese Poem, the latest work by Professor Wang Xiao‑ping, is regarded as the first Chinese academic study to discuss and evaluate research on The Book of Ancient Chinese Poem conducted in foreign countries. Focusing on this great Chinese classic and treasure of world literature, Professor Wang’s book is a comprehensive study that approaches the subject from many perspectives and topics. These include early Japanese research documents on The Book of Ancient Chinese Poem, its dissemination and translation in Japan, its reception in Japan, comparative studies of the text in Japan, as well as detailed discussions of various cultural phenomena related to it. With Sino‑Japanese literary and cultural communication as its special concern, and numerous first‑hand materials as the basis for research, Professor Wang’s book distinguishes itself with broad international academic vision and originality. Since the book is the first of its kind, it will surely advance the study of The Book of Ancient Chinese Poem.

Vol. 2, No. 1, 2010

Vol. 2, No. 1, 2010

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