Schweizerische Gesellschaft für
Skandinavische Studien (SGSS)
Société suisse d’études scandinaves
Einladung zum Festvortrag von
Prof. Dr. Mark Sandberg
(University of California, Berkeley)
Ibsen's Architectural Imagination
as Interdisciplinary Metaphor
Donnerstag, 2. Juni 2016, 18.15 Uhr
Universität Zürich, Deutsches Seminar
Schönberggasse 9, 8001 Zürich, SOD-0-002
The term “imagination” had frequently been used in recent Englishlanguage academic discourse as a marker of both interdisciplinary and
interart relations. “Imagination” is the placeholder concept for that
boundary-crossing activity (the “historical imagination”, the “ethnographic
imagination”, the “urban imagination”, etc.), an activity that mimics the
semantic creativity implicit in the use of metaphor. But like the power
relations implicit in metaphor’s hierarchy of source and target domains, the
structures of home disciplines and borrowed methodologies implicit in the
various forms of “imaginative” boundary crossing have strategic purposes
worth bringing out into the open. Henrik Ibsen’s prose dramas, which could
be described as consistently engaged with what might be called an
“architectural imagination”, provide a good test case for examining the
ways in which interart metaphor seeks to persuade readers and viewers,
in this case, by imagining drama as an “architectural” medium through its
pillars of society, doll houses, and master builders.