Please join Mads Bunch in Marianne Stecher-Hansen’s class on Thursday, May 26th at 1:30 for a Colloquium titled “Karen Blixen and Søren Kierkegaard: Narration and Unreliability” in Raitt Hall, Room 314


Søren Kierkegaard’s thinking has had a major impact on Karen Blixen’s production. Already as early as 1924, during her stay in Africa, she writes excited about Kierkegaard’s notion of “The Individual” in a letter to her brother Thomas Dinesen. Her interest in Kierkegaard lasted throughout her life and even intensified during the 1950s after meeting Danish Scholar Aage Henriksen. Karen Blixen was, however, not just inspired by Kierkegaard’s philosophical ideas, but also by the way he chose to present them. She, as him, used a variety of pseudonyms, but also adapted the Chinese Box composition system we find in Either/Or and Stages on Life’s Way and the sophisticated use of unreliable narrators that she developed to perfection. In this talk I will compare Blixen’s novella Ehrengard and Kierkegaard’s “The Seducer’s Diary” in order to point out similarities and differences in regards to narration and the use of unreliable narrators.


Mads Bunch (b. 1974) is Mag. Art. in Nordic Literature from The University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has been a Lecturer in Danish and Scandinavian Studies at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada since 2006. He has published articles on August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Lars von Trier and contemporary Scandinavian Literature. In 2009 he published the book Samtidsbilleder – realismen i yngre dansk litteratur 1994-2008 [Images of Time – Realism in Danish Literature 1994-2008) describing the new wave of realism in Danish and Scandinavian Literature around the Millennium. He is currently working on the research project Reading Blixen in the Light of Kierkegaard. He will be leaving UBC this summer and return to The University of Copenhagen to finish this project.