It already gossips about itself.” But if hype actually is one of its traits, an examination of how this happens becomes relevant. As William Deresiewicz put it, My Struggle “arrives, as it were, pre-gossiped. This circumstance, however, seems to be a distinctive feature of Knausgaard's work. This media hype has led to the peculiar but not unusual situation where information about a book from another part of the world, another context, reaches readers before they have read or even opened the book. This is particularly relevant in Knausgaard's case, where the media hype around My Struggle has been immense, first in Norway and later in the rest of Scandinavia. Our aim is to theorize what paratextual information does to one's reading-what could be called the paratext's influence function, especially in autobiography-informed literature, where the question of paratext often seems even more consequential than in fiction as such.
In this study of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, and more particularly of its reception, we try to connect different reading experiences of the same literary work across countries (in this particular case, Denmark and France) and translations.
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