Journal Article

Privileged, Hypocritical, and Complicit: Contemporary Scandinavian Literature and the Egalitarian Imagination

Sharma, Devika

2019

Overview

Everyone knows what the predicament of privilege is: It is the awkward yet highly ordinary experience of one's privilege being a problem. I take the predicament of privilege to be a sensibility and an aesthetic that is central—but not exclusive—to contemporary Scandinavian culture. In this article, I examine one literary form taken by this predicament, which I call “hypocrisy literature.” In Scandinavian hypocrisy literature, we meet a globally privileged subject that has come to identify itself as a global problem. According to this literature, the experience that turns one into a self-professed hypocrite is not the acknowledgment of one's own insincerity. Instead, it is the acknowledgment that sincerity will not save one from complicity. As I interpret it, hypocrisy literature is an aesthetic response to a specific historical situation in which the Nordic middle classes suspect that they live at the expense of others. But it is also a response, I suggest, to a development in collective ideas about what can constitute critique at all. That is one way to read hypocrisy literature: as a contemplation of what critique under conditions of complicity may or may not look like. Am I critical, this literature asks?

• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press,Penn State University Press
• Subject: Clases sociales / Comparative literature / Icelandic & Scandinavian literature / Literatura comparada / Scandinavian culture / Social classes