Ph.D. dissertation: Bergur D. Hansen
Started August 1, 2011

The researcher will attempt to classify and analyse K.O. Viderø’s travel writings based on the literary tradition in which European travel literature is rooted.

This includes discussing and establishing their genre. The question of genre is, however, not just one of classification, but rather of the importance of genre for our views on literature and the I/narrator in literature.

Viderø breaks with the formal constraints of both novels and traditional travel journals, he creates a new multi-faceted genre. One of the project theses is that his travel journals reveal a, seemingly, paradoxical development: he clings to his Faroese origins, but at the same time seeks to move away from the Faroes and Faroese culture, and in searching he creates his own language and, ultimately, his own time and place – his own Bakhtinian chronotope.

Referring to the American literary scholar Dennis Porter, this can be described as a form of reverse “mapping” in which Viderø, instead of conquering the unfamiliar, loses his way and changes, but without renouncing fundamental interpretations of existence from a time gone by. This tension gives rise to the existential heaviness of his travel writings.

When it comes to imagery, Viderø uses distinct comparisons, for example, comparing the alien and ominous with something familiar and homely. There are a host of references to other texts (the Bible, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Spengler, Greek epos, Faroese ballads, myths and legends, etc.), which are constantly repeated, function as leitmotifs and as escape routes and connecting paths of sorts. But where to? What was the fundamental driving force of Viderø’s search? What was the purpose, what drew him out into the world and into himself? And is this expressed in his travel writings?