“DET UFERDIGES KRAFT” SOM LITTERÆR VERDI HOS KNUT HAMSUN OG KARL OVE KNAUSGÅRD

In the essay “Sjelens Amerika” [“The America of the Soul”], Karl Ove Knausgård claims that the reason why we still perceive Knut Hamsun’s novels as fresh and present is because they display our own modern world in its very creation, at a time when it was full of “the power of the unfinished” and not yet stiffened in accomplished systems. In this article, I argue that the idea of “the power of the unfinished” is an aesthetic category describing the core of a poetics common to Knausgård and Hamsun.