Andreas Tranvik, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Lund University and an associate researcher at LUCK, has published the article “Specialization on Stage:

The Formation and Deformation of Knowledge in Hedda Gabler and A Dream Play” in Modern Drama.

The article examines two of the most canonical plays in all of Scandinavian and European modern drama – Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890) and August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1902) – through the prism of the history of knowledge. The primary claim of the article is that these two plays are paradigmatic literary representations and critiques of one of the main historical processes pertaining to academic knowledge in modernity: specialization. While specialization is an oft-studied process, sociologically and historically, it remains relatively unexplored in literary scholarship and theatre studies. More specifically, representations of specialization have not received sufficient scholarly attention, in spite of the sustained relevance of the topic. In the article, Tranvik therefore outlines, with the examples of Ibsen and Strindberg, how specialization can be understood not only as a facet of the history of knowledge proper but also in the context of literary history and the history of drama.

The article can be found here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966609

Image: Hedda Gabler og Eilert Løvborg. Lillebil Ibsen og Ola Isene på Det Nye Teater 1943. Av Polyfoto/Arbeiderbevegelsens arkiv og bibliotek. Lisens: CC BY NC ND 4.0