A Poetics of the Insignificant

Abstract

Museum director and author Peter Seeberg is among the most well-known and celebrated Danish writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Several of his works have been translated into various European languages but so far only a few are published in English. For this reason, scholarly discussions on his works in English are relatively sparse. In this article, I present and discuss Seeberg and a genre called fictional documentarism, which he developed during the second half of his writing career. My main argument is that Seeberg, in conceiving fictional documentarism, was inspired primarily by his museum work and secondarily by his interest in modern European philosophy and literature. Furthermore, I argue that the uniqueness of the genre lies in the way he managed to combine a challenge to the boundaries between fiction and documentation with a personal philosophy about giving voice to apparently small and insignificant things in life.