Character assassinations, attacks and self-accusations around Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52610/rhs.v25i82.16Keywords:
Character assassinations, autobiographical novels, autofiction, accusations, Karl Ove Knausgaard, My StruggleAbstract
This article studies the effects of the ambiguous accusations around Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel in six parts, My struggle (2009-11). The novel’s portrait of a number of named individuals and family members brought the relationship between artistic freedom and defamation, responsibility, guilt and shame up for discussion, and initiated negotiations of collective norms and values in connection with autobiographical novels. An analysis of the rhetorical strategies behind the family’s accusations at the time of the publication, initially illuminates the ethical dilemmas the family helped to raise in the public debate. Next, the accusations in the novels themselves are studied and the article shows a need to consider how differently the accusations appear in and outside the novels, because the autobiographical novel establishes an ambiguous statement that is not found in the media coverage.
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