Day 7

No real work on the book so far today. I did finish reading what I needed to get through in Watson's Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Otherwise, I spent my time at work doing a totally necessary office purge and assembling all my secondary literature for the book into a notebook. That counts for something, doesn't it?


PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 6

Woke up and added a little bit based on Watson's Literary Tourism to chapter four. When I saw that this brought me to just under 1000 new words in the past 24 hours I did a little editing of the introductory section and bumped the total up to 1010 words. Yippee, I made my first milestone for the month! It looks like 1000 words is about three pages double-spaced for me, so that means I now need a total of 9000 words by the end of the month. I think I can, I think I can...


Later: Had a fairly non-productive day at work. I did get good feedback on my introduction draft, though I'm going to sit on that for a while longer - maybe even until I'm done with all five chapters - before I revise it. I did some reading in Per Gynt-Gården: En gjestebok to see if there was anything there I could make use of. Not sure there was. I was interested to read how Dobloug's background is described as lower middle class and average, despite the fact that both his mother and he inherited what amounts to a fortune. He stresses his being raised by a single mother in a humble Oslo apartment, perhaps as a way of authenticating and legitimizing the raw luxury of the Per Gynt-gården itself? I don't think, though, that there's really any reason to include that discussion in my chapter.


I also read some more in the Watson monograph, and have found some good material. I decided to start a second document, as I'm not sure how much of that material will actually make it into the chapter. I've printed out the draft of the chapter so far, and will read it carefully tomorrow. I haven't looked at it as a whole at all. 


One other task I got done was the drafting of an abstract for the Across Media conference in Trondheim in early May. I'm calling it "Tourism as Adaptation: Ibsen's Peer Gynt in Gudbrandsdalen."


PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 455 words

Day 5

Woke up this morning and started skimming Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (1998). Found some useful material in chapter three, "Destination Museum," so I sat down to work it into chapter four. I added about 150 words before E woke up and started his incessant chattering.


While perusing Kirshenblatt-Gimblett I came up with a good idea for a small, non-Peer Gynt project on the Ibsen Museum.


Later: up to 523 words by adding an introductory section to the chapter based on Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Now I need to turn my attention to Nicola J. Watson and define "literary tourism" for the chapter. But I think I'll read a little further in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett first, to make sure I'm not missing things of major importance. I think I need to read chapter one, "Objects of Ethnography," where she defines "in situ" display in terms of metonymy and mimesis.


Later still: added a short section to the conclusion, up to 705 words added to the chapter. I found the seven "propositions" (149) that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett bases her argument on really productive. Here they are:

1. Heritage is a new mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past.
2. Heritage is a "value added" industry.
3. Heritage produces the local for export.
4. A hallmark of heritage is the problematic relationship of its objects to the instruments of their display.
5. Heritage is produced through a process that forecloses what is shown.
6. Heritage tests the alienability of inalienable possessions.
7. A key to heritage productions is their virtuality, whether in the presence or the absence of actualities.

I found number four particularly useful, so I had to stop there and work it into my conclusion before reading further. I may come to regret my hastiness, but I'm really just so engaged by the reading that I get swept up in it. Now I have to stop working though and start engaging with my offspring!

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 523 words

Day 4

I did nothing book-related today.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 3

Today I read two articles:

1. Herbert, David. “Literary Places, Tourism and the Heritage Experience.” Annals of Tourism Research 28.2 (2001): 312-333 (helps define the terms of the problem of “authenticity” in relation to both historical and fictional sites)
2. Halewood, Chris and Kevin Hannam. “Viking Heritage Tourism: Authenticity and Commodification.”Annals of Tourism Research 28.3 (2001):565-580 (awkward style and some obvious spelling mistakes like "krøner" instead of "kroner" turned me off, but the bibliography is very useful)

Other than that, nothing.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 2

Started reading Hans Aaraas' Peer Gynt: En drøm om en drømmer og hans drøm. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1995 this morning. It is a phenomenological reading of PG, and it got me thinking about chapter one and my Deleuzian reading. I am thinking of how to restructure that chapter so that I present my own reading in opposition to three philosophical interpretations. One I already have from the article version. One I'd like to add is a discussion building off of Kristin Gjesdal's article, "Ibsen om Hegel, kulturelt besserwisseri og den store kunstens begynnelse." I should also probably add Gisle Selnes' "Ibsens orientalisme: En hegeliansk historie," which I haven't read yet. And then I might also add Aaraas as a third example, though I'm not exactly sure.

Once on campus I picked up three books at the library:

• Hansen, Erik Fosnes, ed. Per Gynt-Gården: En gjestebok. Oslo: Forlaget Press, 2008.
• Iversen, Ragnvald. Ibsen-ordbok: Ordforrådet i Henrik Ibsens samlede verker. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1858.
• Larsen, Trond Jahr. Peer Gynt-koden. Oslo: Abstrakt, 2006.

The first of these is a total treasure trove of material for chapter four. I was able to add about 200 words to the chapter, and have ideas for a lot more. In particular, an essay by Kjell Arild Pollestad got me thinking of Per Gynt-Gården as a place of pilgrimage, which in turn got me curious about literary pilgrimage (or tourism) in general. Assuming that there's been work done to theorize this I went to the MLA database and found the following reference:

• Watson, Nicola J., ed. Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

This looks really promising, with tons of fun articles. I think it will help me construct the theoretical component that is missing from chapter four.

*

ETA: I'm not even done reading the introduction to Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture and I can already tell this is going to be really useful. Here's an important quote for framing my chapter four:

• "[...] writers on place and literature have usually been more interested in the effect of place upon an individual author's oeuvre [...] than in how an oeuvre might have shaped the subsequent history of a place" (4-5). Right on! The author goes on to argue that literary scholars have been embarrassed by the ("lowbrow") phenomenon of literary tourism, which is why it is only now that scholars are starting to pay attention to it. 

Another good formulation:

• "With the de-differentiation of the literary from other forms of story-telling, scholars of the cross-media migration and adaptation of a story in popular culture have become aware of tourism as a form of adaptation" (6). Yes! Yes! Yes!

Right there I've learned a term for what I'm looking at, "cross-media migration" and the paragraph goes on to describe the newly formed field of studies know as "heritage studies," which is also totally relevant to what I want to do. Watson describes it as describing "[...] how literary heritage is expressed in place" (6)!!!!

Watson cites the following really promising sources for heritage studies:

• Newby, Peter. "Literature and the Fashioning of Tourist Taste." Humanistic Geography and Literature. Ed. Douglas Pocock. London: Croom Helm, 1980.
• Pocock, Douglas. "The Experience of a Literary Place." Humanistic Geography and Literature. Ed. Douglas Pocock. London: Croom Helm, 1980.
• Fawcett, Clara and Patricia Cormack. "Guarding Authenticity at Literary Tourism Sites." Annals of Tourism Research  28.3 (2001): 686-704
• Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage. Berkeley, CA: U California P, 1998. Here's the kicker: "[...] tourists travel to actual destinations to experience virtual places" (9).
• Herbert, David T. "Literary Places, Tourism, and the Heritage Experience." Annals of Tourism Research 28.2 (2001): 312-33

Then there's Watson's own book, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (2006), which I absolutely must read. Here's how she summarizes it:

[...] a history and a taxonomy of literary tourist sites, principally British, from the late eighteenth century through to the late nineteenth, arguing that literary place is (counter-intuitively) produced by writing mediated by acts of readerly tourism, and that it is the internal dynamics of an author's works, buttressed by a particularised series of intertexts and associated publishing practices, which produce literary place, and not the other way around (however strenuously place may subsequently be organised to look like the originating ground for writing). Identifying the ways in which texts solicit readers to locate and re-experience them within the specificities of place, the book also examines how places have been designed to accrete, secrete, and authenticate "memories" of writers and of works, effecting in aggregate a mapping of national literary heritage onto a national mythic geography. (Literary Tourism 7)

Wow. That's exactly what I've been writing about, but I was completely unaware of all of this prior research. It will be so helpful to have this to build upon!

*

Since I was at a four-hour mentoring meeting, the only other thing I had time for was to piece together a paper proposal on Gatas Gynt for the 2011 SASS conference in Chicago. I now really have to stop working on this fun stuff and turn my attention to preparing for tomorrow. Drat. Just when things are getting good! I do think I'll swing by the library and pick up the book on literary tourism though! Oh, I did try calling that person at the amateur theater company in Lillehammer, but she didn't answer her phone.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: a little over 200 words

Day 1

• Shower thought: I could use the Øverland/Opøien PG comic strip from 1970 as an opening anecdote to chapter 3. I wonder if it can be related to the lead up to the EEC referendum in 1972. What else was going on in Norway in 1970? The first wave of immigration. Need to read Jon Nygård's piece about it in Aftenposten.
• Shower thought: I should just call Maihaugen to inquire about the St. Hansnats Eventyr performance. Is it still going on? 

I should also probably think about this (and the may reviews of the performance listed in Ibsen-bibliografien):

Haagensen, Nils-Øivind. "Nynorsk bukkeritt." Klassekampen Oslo 11/1-(2005) (Om Jon Fosses oversettelse av Peer Gynt til nynorsk for Robert Wilsons oppsetning på Det norske teatret. Intervju med dramaturg Ola E. Bø. )

There's mention of translation to Gudbrandsdal dialect and an earlier Nynorsk translation for Det norske Teatret in chapter 4. I need to integrate this new translation into that factoid. But wait, maybe it merits a slightly longer discussion in chapter 3 too?

Oooh, and what about this:

Frihet som livsbetingelse: Ibsen international short text project. Oslo: Transit, 2006 (Antologi med åtte av de norske bidragene til Det Åpne Teaters "Ibsen international short text challenge 2006": Husarenes ettermiddag / Jesper Halle. Fridom / Jon Fosse. Stolen / Gro Dahle. Jegerne / Wetle Holtan. Skade / Arne Lygre. Utflukt / Gyrid Axe Øvsteng. Vi to / Marit Tusvik. Rød, Snø og Ulven / Lisa C B Lie. ISBN 82-7596-073-8, ISBN 978-82-7596-073-1 

I definitely need to look at that to see if there are any PG-related texts. ETA: I looked at it and it will have to wait until later. I just don't have time right now to read it, though I'll try to squeeze it in after Christmas.

There is also a short film competition from the same year (the Ibsen Jubilee) that I want to look at, but both will probably end up being a separate project.

• Afternoon: No research or writing, since I had to prepare my last class for the term, which is on Jon Fosse's Nokon kjem til å komme. I did call Maihaugen and got the number for a contact at Lillehammer Amatørteater, the company that put on the production. I was a little intimidated to cold call a person who is probably just a volunteer. I would have much preferred an email address. I'll need to work up the guts to call her. It doesn't sound like it was much of a success beyond the 1991 performance.

• Afternoon: On and off all day I checked out various hotels and resorts, and ended up booking a room at Voksenåsen (up past Holmenkollen here on the outskirts of Oslo) for my writing retreat from 20-22 December. It's expensive, but I really hope it will be worth it.

• On the ferry: read Tveterås, Harald L. “Botten-Hansens Huldrebrylluppet og Ibsens Peer Gynt.” Edda 4 (1967): 247-262

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero