Content area
Full Text
* Tanya Thresher. Cecilie Løveid: Engendering a Dramatic Tradition. Ed. Pal Bjørby. Scandinavian Women Writers 2. Laksevaåg: Alvheim & Eide Akademisk forlag, 2005. Pp. 141.
In her book on Cecilie Løveid's drama, Tanya Thresher offers a wellinformed reading of Løveid's Barock Friise and Østerrike as well as a discussion about the dramatist's theater aesthetics and its status in Norwegian drama today. Taking as the point of departure the "differences" of Løveid's texts and their subsequent challenge to the audience and the theater institutions, Thresher places her study in a dialogue with former interpretations and with feminist theory. This is clearly productive and in line with the problems at stake in Løveid's work, but in practice it also tends to become a confirmative analysis more than a critical one. Still Thresher's study opens up this unique dramatic form and presents a useful way of understanding it.
Thresher's intention is to "situate Løveid's work in a discussion of sexual difference and analyze the position she holds within contemporary Norwegian drama" (13). This aim gives the scope of research a certain bias, or at least it directs the reading into a quite narrow focus, and I am glad to discover that the author in fact gives us a slightly more elaborated interpretation than this statement suggests. The two drama readings thoroughly place the texts in an intellectual and aesthetic context and explain to the reader how Løveid's fragmented, intertextual, and interartistic form may be comprehended. They also reveal the significance of gender tensions such as they appear within the drama and the historical past and present. Thresher's readings highlight the dramatic technique, the allusions and the linguistic play, and the thematic implications of this aesthetics.
Barock Friise (1991) consists of a number of tableaux about the historical person Zille Gad who lived in Bergen from around 1675...