Didaktik utan tendens – Boccaccios falk och Per Hallströms novell ’Falken’

• Didactics Without Tendency: Boccaccio’s Falcon and Per Hallström’s Short Story “The Falcon” The issue of this essay is how and why a pre-modern didactics is sneaked into a modern aestheticist short story: Per Hallström’s “The Falcon” in the collection Purpur [Purple] (1895). The operation is performed without moralizing tendencies and yet subtly edifying capacities emerge. This is done by displaying the aestheticist devices in an implicit (hypertextual) dialogue with a pre-modern classic: the story of the falcon in Boccaccio’s Decamerone (5:9). The overarching device is an inverted (chiasmic) logic, manipulating opposites like give/take, love/desire, feed/devour, self-sacrifice/voracity, and scapegoat/predator. In this context also Paul Heyse’s so called “Falcon theory” is discussed. Theoretical perspectives of use for the analysis are short story theories of restriction and intensity (Allan Pasco, Kay Dollerup); Gérard Genette’s concept of hypertextuality; and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and the need of a scapegoat

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Etik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- Ethics (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

aestheticism

Boccaccio

didactics

hypertextuality

Per Hallstrom

short story

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)