On the Commons: A Geocritical Reading of Amager Fælled

Abstract

This chapter proposes a geocritical reading of a rather inconspicuous place in Denmark which nonetheless stands out by virtue of its strikingly insistent appearance in Danish literature during the past three years. To read geocritically means, in Bertrand Westphal’s phrasing, to examine “the multifocalization of viewpoints on a given reference space,” and this is precisely what the place that will be examined here makes possible, since quite a lot has actually been written about it recently. Following Westphal, I shall regard the specific place that is of interest here, Amager Fælled (or in English, Amager Common) as a place whose specificity engenders specific movements within the literature that interacts with it.