Specialization on Stage: The Formation and Deformation of Knowledge in Hedda Gabler and A Dream Play.

This article analyzes Henrik Ibsen's *Hedda Gabler* (1890) and August Strindberg's *A Dream Play* (1902) as critical literary representations of specialization, a key historical process in the modern history of academic knowledge. It argues that Ibsen's play dramatizes the decline of the polymath (the "fox") and the rise of the specialist (the "hedgehog") through the intellectual conflict between the characters Ejlert Løvborg and Jørgen Tesman, reflecting the epistemic challenges faced by scholars amid increasing disciplinary fragmentation. Strindberg's *A Dream Play* satirizes the modern university as a fractured institution divided by incommensurable faculties, portraying specialization as a cause of institutional dysfunction and an epistemological crisis. Together, these plays offer distinct dramatic critiques of the promises and perils of specialization and disciplinarity in modernity, highlighting the intellectual and social costs of knowledge fragmentation.