I denne study guide får du hjælp til at analysere Siri Hustvedts essay om storbyliv, “Living With Strangers”, som var en del af skriftlig eksamen for Engelsk A på STX d. 25. maj 2011. Udover analysehjælpen giver vi dig et summary af teksten samt inspiration til diskussion og perspektivering.
Eksamensspørgsmål
Write an essay (900-1200 words) in which you analyse and comment on Siri Hustvedt's essay "Living With Strangers". Part of your essay must focus on the genre and on the attitude to urban living that is explored in the essay.
Præsentation af teksten
Titel: “Living With Strangers” (2002)
Forfatter: Siri Hustvedt
Genre: Essay
Siri Hustvedt (født 1955) er en amerikansk forfatter, der har en norsk mor og en amerikansk far. I 1978 flyttede hun til New York for at studere, og hun er siden blevet en internationalt anerkendt forfatter af både essays, digte og romaner. Hun er gift med Paul Auster, der er tilsvarende anerkendt for sin forfattergerning.
Hustvedts essay “Living With Strangers” blev først udgivet i 2002 i avisen The New York Times under titlen “NEW YORK OBSERVED; Look Away”, og i 2006 blev den så udgivet under titlen “Living With Strangers” som del af essaysamlingen A Plea for Eros. Som så mange andre af hendes værker undersøger disse essays, inklusiv “Living With Strangers”, tematikker som identitet og den menneskelige psyke.
Uddrag
Nedenfor kan du se et uddrag fra vores study guide til essayet:
Essay characteristics
The exam question asks you to focus on the genre of Hustvedt’s text, which would make sense to include in the analysis part of your essay (not the comment part).
“Living With Strangers” is an essay, which means that it is a non-fiction text - it deals with matters from real life. Roughly speaking, an essay is situated between literature and philosophy. Hustvedt’s essay contains a number of essay characteristics, and we have chosen five of these which we will now take you through. You may very well recognize some of them from Danish class. (If not, you may now be able to impress your Danish teacher with this knowledge).
Subjective style of writing
This is one of the key characteristics of an essay. We see the subjective style in “Living With Strangers” by Hustvedt’s frequent use of the personal pronoun “I” as well as the many examples from her own life. In fact, she uses this technique right from the first line: “In rural Minnesota where I grew up, it was the custom to greet everyone you met on the road, whether you knew the person or not, with a ‘hi’” (ll. 1-2). The effect of her subjective point of view is that we become curious; we want to know more about her and her personal story.
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