In this lecture Toril Moi will argue that Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle represents something new in literary history. She reads My Struggle as a writer's search for a new form, an attempt to find an answer to the question: What comes after postmodernism? She shows that Knausgaard's concept of form is utterly at odds with the traditional concept of form developed by literary critics in the wake of modernism. That concept was formalist: it made us believe that form can be discussed without reference to meaning, effects, content, feelings, experiences and so on. Through an attentive reading of My Struggle, Toril Moi raises the question of wether it is possible to develop a non-formalist notion of literary form.
