Nytt skrift frå Ivar Aasen-instituttet

Who belongs to the Norwegian nation? Those who carry a Norwegian passport? Residence permit? Those who speak Norwegian? Those with Norwegian ancestors? Those who have lived a certain period on the Norwegian territory? Indeed who belongs to the Norwegian? And who decides who belongs? Who or what authority prescribes the criteria for inclusion or exclusion in the group "Norwegian"?

It is not the nation itself, but the concept of nation which was prosecuted on the 19th century ideological fields of battle and in the articles and treatises of Ivar Aasen. The struggle for Norway in the 19th century is the struggle for the concept of Norway, for possession of the concept's territory, for the right to draw its borders and crea te aorps of conceptual border police, charged with the task of
governing and policing the Norwegian.

Who will own the concept, who will manipulate it, according to which terms, andwith regard to whom? Ivar Aasen was thus not merely the engeneer of a language, a capable philologist who carried out the nuts and bolts labor necessary to consolidate the New Norwegian language. He was the catalyst of the question of nation, of cultural identity in general and of Norwegian cultural identity in particular. Aasen did not fix Norwegian cultural identity for all times, but rather he problematized it, recast it as a question: New Norwegian as an interrogation, a challenge, a possibility, and a moral imperative.

INSTIT : Høgskulen i Volda, HVO Ivar Aasen-instituttet (f.o.m. 1998)
FORF : Burgess, J. Peter
Ivar Aasen-instituttet (f.o.m. 1998), Høgskulen i Volda, HVO
TITTEL : Ivar Aasen's Logic of Nation : toward a Philosophy of Culture
STED : Volda
UTGIV : Høgskulen i Volda
SIDEREG: 158 s.
ISBN : 82-7661-102-8
ISSN : 0807-6243
SPRÅK : eng
SERIE : Skrifter frå Ivar Aasen-instituttet
ÅR : 1999
HEFTE : Nr. 6
TILGANG: Haugen Bok, 6100 Volda