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Join Monika Zagar
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December 2 at 4 p.m.
University of Minnesota
Bookstore
For details on events or
Knut Hamsun, please contact
Rachael Levay at
(857) 756.8443 or remann@u.washington.edu
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See the Film Version of River of Renewal
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A full line-up of PBS stations showing River of Renewal is available on the film's website.
For details on events or
River of Renewal,
please contact
Rachael Levay at
(857) 756.8443 or remann@u.washington.edu
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Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, Knut Hamsun (1859-1952)
was a towering figure of Norwegian letters. He was also a Nazi
sympathizer and supporter of the German occupation of Norway during the
Second World War. In 1943, Hamsun sent his Nobel medal to Third-Reich
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as a token of his admiration and
authored a reverential obituary for Hitler in May 1945. For decades,
scholars have wrestled with the dichotomy between Hamsun's merits as a
writer and his infamous ties to Nazism.
In her incisive study of
Hamsun, Monika Zagar refuses to separate his political and cultural
ideas from an analysis of his highly regarded writing. Her analysis
reveals the ways in which messages of racism and sexism appear in
plays, fiction, and none-too-subtle nonfiction produced by a prolific
author over the course of his long career. In the process, Zagar
illuminates Norway's changing social relations and long history of
interaction with other peoples. Making the case that
Hamsun's support of Nazi political ideals was a natural outgrowth of
his reactionary aversion to modernity, Knut Hamsun serves as a
corrective to scholarship treating Hamsun's Nazi ties as unpleasant but
peripheral details in a life of literary achievement.
Monika Zagar is associate professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Minnesota.
"Knut
Hamsun is a very important contribution not only to the study of Knut
Hamsun's oeuvre but also to the general study of literature. By asking
the question of how Hamsun's works have been affected by his political
and social attitudes, Zagar offers an instructive example of how
crucial it is not to separate literary works from the context that
enabled them." - Jan Sjavik, University of Washington
"Zagar
makes a strong case for the importance of discussing Hamsun's views on
modernity, race, genetics, eugenics, and gender to understand his
'repugnant' politics." - Anne Sabo, St. Olaf College |
 River of Renewal: Myth and History in the Klamath Basin
By Stephen Most
The documentary River of Renewal, by Stephen Most and based on the book, will air on 770 PBS stations around the United States. To find a station near you, please click here.
"Most tells these stories in the voices of the protagonists, who give
the basin's complex history an illuminating immediacy that infuses the
entire book. It is a mark of his achievement that he has been able to
make these historical, cultural, and environmental pieces into a
comprehensive whole. River of Renewal is the best source available for
those wishing to think clearly about this cumulative tragedy, as well
as a first-rate model for regional land use anywhere in the American
West." - Orion Magazine
A land of mountains, forests, wetlands,
lakes, and rivers, the Klamath Basin spans the Oregon-California state
line. Farms and ranches, logging towns, and back-to-the-land
communities are scattered over this 10-million-acre bioregion. There
are Indian reservations at the headwaters, at the estuary, and across
the major tributary of the Klamath River. In this place that has
witnessed, ever since the Gold Rush, a succession of wars and resource
conflicts, myths of the West loom large, amplifying differences among
its inhabitants.
At the core of the contemporary controversy is
overallocation of the waters of the Klamath Basin. This dispute has
pitted farmers and ranchers against those whose cultures and
livelihoods depend upon fishing and others who would forestall the
extinction of wild salmon. Yet it has also revealed the unity of the
Klamath Basin, the interdependence of economic recovery with ecological
restoration, and the urgency for all the communities within the Basin
to find common ground.
Stephen Most is a playwright and
documentary storyteller. He has contributed to numerous documentary
films, including Emmy Award winners Wonders of Nature and Promises and
the Academy Award-nominated Berkeley in the Sixties. His plays Medicine
Show, Watershed, and A Free Country dramatize events in Pacific
Northwest history.
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The 
Knut Hamsun: 