Heliocentric Utopianism: Ecological Imagination and Utopian Longing in Inger Christensen and in Contemporary Danish Literature

Autor: Tue Andersen Nexø
Jazyk: German<br />English
Rok vydání: 2024
Předmět:
Zdroj: Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik, Vol 11 (2024)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2698-492X
2698-4938
DOI: 10.25353/ubtr-izfk-6b3d-474a
Popis: This essay discusses the relationship between Inger Christensen’s work and contemporary Danish eco-literature. Christensen can seem like a towering predecessor. Yet, the relationship is more complex than a question of anxiety of influence. This essay argues that Christensen and contemporary Danish literature exhibit differing ecological imaginaries, and that this becomes clear when one examines Christensen’s utopian writing, her heliocentric utopianism, of the late seventies and early eighties, and when one examines how ecological threats are depicted in her work. For Christensen, the paradigmatic threat to the world is the nuclear bomb and its excessive use of energy, for today’s literature it is the feedback loops of pollution, exemplified in the threat of climate change.
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