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When teaching literature to high school or college pupils, or university students—i.e., inexperienced readers—there are great benefits in using shorter prose texts, so-called «box-texts». The practical short format of flash fiction, short prose, and prose lyric is already known, and the everyday experience from using brevity when writing and reading e-mails, news stories, mobile texts, telling anecdotes and jokes, and life in social media in general will inform and guide untrained readers of literature. By focusing on an already known (but not internalized) format and the economy of language therein and highlighting the format as a didactive resource in its own right, teachers of literature can more easily educate pupils and students with the knowledge that certain ways of thinking about aesthetics, form(at) and language are familiar to readers, who will nevertheless need theorizing and teaching., Å bruke korte prosatekster (såkalte «kassetekster») i litteraturundervisningen har store fordeler, både i videregående skole og i høyere utdanning. Kortformatet – anvendt i kortprosa, lynfiksjoner og prosalyrikk – er nemlig kjent for unge, utrente lesere ettersom det blir brukt i e-poster, nyhetsartikler, Twitter-tekster, Snapchat-beskjeder og andre kulturtekster, også muntlige. Ved å utnytte et velkjent format (og dette formatets økonomiske språk), og dermed gjøre formatet til en didaktisk ressurs, kan litteraturundervisere lettere utdanne elever og studenter fordi de allerede har foreliggende kunnskaper om tekst, form, estetikk og språk. De vil likevel trenge teori om og undervisning i kortformatet.

The USA had an significant influence on the Nobel Prize-Winning authors Johannes V. Jensen and Knut Hamsun. Both authors spent significant amounts of time in America and subsequently expressed their thoughts and opinions on the country in the form of books and articles. Their diverging views on the topics of technological advancements and America’s future role in the world, serve to capture a small but significant part of the larger debate on America’s role in the Nordic countries in the early 20th century, USA havde en betydelig indflydelse på Knut Hamsun og Johannes V. Jensens forfatterskab. Forfatterne tilbragte begge lange perioder i Amerika, og delte med stor entusiasme deres meninger om landet i bøger of artikler. Deres forskellige holdninger til Amerikansk industrialisering of teknologi samt USAs rolle i verdenen, giver os et glimt af en lille men indflydelsesrig del af debatten om Amerika i de nordiske lande i starten af det tyvende århundrede.

Using a psychoanalytic perspective, I explore Knut Hamsun’s novels, Sult (1890), Mysterier (1892), Pan (1894), and Victoria (1898) and focus on the power that the women in fantasy have over the different male protagonists, whom I term the Hamsunian male. Within each fantasy, the women either dominate or exert supernatural power over the Hamsunian male. By undertaking such an investigation, I examine how the desired women in fantasy differ from the main female characters, in so far as they portray the Hamsunian male’s desire that ranges from intense eroticism to fear and death. While my focus on the female characters in the Hamsunian male differs from the discussions concerning the main female characters, I note that such women comment on the depiction of the masculine gender in Hamsun’s work. Furthermore, the discussion shows the power of women in fantasy, thus questioning whether they should continue to be disregarded as only superficially feminine.