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Ellen Rees. Ibsen's Peer Gynt and the Production of Meaning. Oslo: Center for Ibsen Studies, 2014. Pp. 157.
The book Ibsen's Peer Gynt and the Production of Meaning by Ellen Rees, professor at the University of Oslo's Center for Ibsen Studies, is number 11 in the Acta Ibseniana Series published by the Center for Ibsen Studies. This volume is one of the two projects Rees completed during a postdoctoral research fellowship in Nordic literature at the University of Oslo between 2009 and 2012. She wrote it while also working on the monograph Cabins in Modern Norwegian Literature: Negotiating Place and Identity (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014). The books share Rees's interest in analyzing the cultural symbols that have contributed to the construction of Norwegian national identity during modernity. While Cabins in Modern Norwegian Literature explores how the trope of cabins and other temporary dwellings functions in a variety of literary genres and film, Ibsen's Peer Gynt and the Production of Meaning is dedicated to contemporary popular reception of the play, deemed Norway's most important canonical literary text.
Rees argues that based on the sheer number of adaptations, appropriations, and parodies of Peer Gynt, no other literary work has occupied a more significant place in the collective imagination of the nation. Her goal, however, is not to catalog appropriations of Peer Gynt, but rather to analyze how the play has been used as a tool to generate new meanings in the ongoing construction of Norwegian identity. According to Rees, "Peer Gynt is activated in public discourse as a tool for understanding the current situation, as a touchstone for confirming cultural identity, or even a sort of prophetic code" (p. 9). Rees casts her eye widely, examining attempts by Norwegian authors, comic strip artists, theatre and film directors, and business entrepreneurs to crack the Gyntian code of what it means to be Norwegian in the age of globalization and digital technologies.
One reason Peer Gynt stands out from other widely appropriated canonical literary works in literary and popular cultural discourses is its resistance to a single, definitive interpretation. In the first chapter, Rees offers a postmodern reading of Henrik Ibsen's play within the framework of French philosophical thought, as represented by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel...