Material Culture and Everyday Life in Literature

Helen R. Durst, Junior Fellow

For Helen Durst, literature is a place where everyday life leaves its traces. Her work is driven by a deceptively simple question: how do material objects move through literary texts, and what can they tell us about the lives, social worlds, and historical conditions in which those texts were written? By paying close attention to things that might otherwise seem ordinary, Helen explores how literature registers lived experience through detail, repetition, and form.

Helen is a PhD candidate in Scandinavian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, and currently works as a Danish lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After many years teaching high school mathematics in Michigan, she returned to academia to pursue a long-standing engagement with Danish language and culture—an interest that began when she was an exchange student in Denmark in the mid-1980s. She is now completing her doctoral dissertation on the works of Tove Ditlevsen, one of the most significant voices in twentieth-century Danish literature.

A formative moment in Helen’s research journey came during a conversation with her advisor about a little-known British author whose writing centered everyday working-class life. Being encouraged to read Ditlevsen in that context proved decisive. As Helen recalls:

We talked about a little-known British author I enjoyed who centered everyday working-class life, and my advisor said that it reminded her of Tove Ditlevsen’s writing. That was when I started reading Ditlevsen.

At TRANSITION, Helen’s research focuses on how material culture and intertextuality operate across Ditlevsen’s extensive body of work. Through close readings informed by theories of materiality and intertextuality, she examines how everyday objects – such as shoes, umbrellas, domestic interiors, or household items – circulate across poems, novels, short stories, and memoirs. Rather than treating these objects as background detail, Helen reads them as carriers of social history, connecting literary form to working-class life, gendered experience, and the emergence of the Danish welfare state.

Helen’s project connects to ongoing research at TRANSITION by illuminating how literary texts register experiences of social transition at the level of everyday life. As such, she offers new ways of understanding how literature can make visible the textures of working-class existence in Denmark before and during periods of profound societal change.