The Abyss or Life Is Simple: Reading Knausgaard Writing Religion - Hardcover

Bender, Courtney; Biles, Jeremy; Carlson, Liane; Dubler, Joshua; Garvey, Hannah C.; Harriss, M. Cooper; Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers; Thorstensen, Dr. Erik

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226821323 ISBN 13: 9780226821320

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2022

Synopsis

An absorbing collection of essays on religious textures in Knausgaard’s writings and our time.

Min kamp, or My Struggle, is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the novel presents an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a writer with the same name as the author, in a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted.

In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of My Struggle. Some were interested in Knausgaard’s attention to explicitly religious subjects and artworks, others to what they saw as more diffuse attention to the religiousness of contemporary life. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor―a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.

About this title

About the Author

Courtney Bender, Jeremy Biles, Liane Carlson, Joshua Dubler, Hannah C. Garvey, M. Cooper Harriss, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and Erik Thorstensen comprise a Knausgaard Reading and Writing Collective.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2022
• ISBN 10: 0226821323
• ISBN 13: 9780226821320
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184