Syftet med min uppsats har varit att undersöka hur en romankaraktär kan förstås utifrån två analytiska ramar, intermedialitet och kaosnarration. Undersökningen består utav en inledande registrering av de intermediala elementen, en efterföljande fördjupning och slutligen en kortare, kaosnarratologisk analys där romanen placeras i en passande kontext.

I den här uppsatsen undersökts hur greppet mise en abyme kan användas som ett dekonstruktivt verktyg i fiktionen. De tre romanerna som ligger till grund för uppsatsen är Montecore - en unik tiger av Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Sara Stridsbergs Drömfakulteten: tillägg till sexualteorin samt If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler av Italo Calvino. Gemensamt för romanerna är att de alla genom att kommentera sin egen tillkomst och låta boken uppträda i boken skapar en osäkerhet i frågan om vad som är sanning och inte i de respektive berättelserna. Sanningen rubbas och dekonstrueras om vartannat genom användandet av mise en abyme.

The following master’s thesis consists of an analysis of the narrative positions in the novel The Faculty of Dreams of Sara Stridsberg, a literary fantasy written about the life of the writer and radical feminist Valerie Solanas. Through my thesis I argue that the implicit author, the narratological position of the narrator, and the character called “The Narrator”, all three belong to, and constitute, the fictional character Valerie. In order to conduct this analysis I use narratological theory, with Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and Mieke Bal as primary theorists, along with theory concerning spatiality and temporality. The analysis is backed up with metafictional theory as well as research into physical and mental reactions caused by trauma, conducted by Bessel van der Kolk. The analysis is sectioned into four parts, with every part focusing on a specific topic: “The Narrator’s” dialogues with Valerie, the novels five different sections (“Land of Bambi”, “The Oceans”, “The Laboratory Park”, “The Factory” and “Love Valerie”), the presence of the cursive fragments and finally the alphabetical lists which appear at different occasions in the novel. The novel acts as a reclamation of power as Valerie recovers her stolen voice, giving herself the opportunity of narrating her own life. The fictional character Valerie salvages her autonomy and receives her rectification by rewriting conversations which have taken place in court rooms, psychiatric hospitals and between different people in her life. She is no longer an external spectator of her own life. Instead she is the one in charge. The narratological levels have collapsed. Only Valarie remains.

This study aims to examine the norm-breaking body in Sara Stridsbergs literary fantasy Drömfakulteten (2006) or The Faculty of Dreams (English translation, 2019) which explores Valerie Solanas’ life. Solanas is known for the feminist text SCUM Manifesto (1968, Swedish translation, 2003) and for shooting the artist Andy Warhol.  Solanas has a very distinct separation between body and mind that is apparent in the novel. She ignores her body and whishes not to be aware of it. She only ever thinks about her manifesto, which becomes her mind. To explore the norm-breaking body, my essay is based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the grotesque body. In this work, I also present different theories that have been inspired by the grotesque, for instance; the female grotesque and the gurlesque. While the grotesque focuses more on the body as a biological organism, the female grotesque and gurlesque focus more on how the female body and femininity is perceived in society and how they break the societal norms. The women are making a “spectacle of themselves”, in Mary Russo’s words. I want to apply these theories on the protagonist, Valerie Solanas, and analyze how the grotesque and norm-breaking body is portrayed in the novel. To further the exploration between body and mind I have the decided to analyze the meaning of the manifesto for Solanas, and also the narrator’s role in how her body is described to the reader.

This study has two aims and addresses two areas of investigation. The first aim is to examine, in four novels and their textual worlds, what role is played by collective self-images and essentialist identities in maintaining power structures in regard to gender, class, norms for mental functions, and ethnicity. Whether, and if so, how, the novel’s deconstruction of language and images can function as resistance to hegemonic oppression? What does the encounter between the privileged collective and the marginalized look like in the novel, and what happens in this encounter? The project’s second aim is to probe what criticism of, and what strategies for resistance to, various power structures reading can provide. To what extent is it possible to speak of responsibility for, and in, the reading of fictional works? What role is played by the (un)expected and the conditionality in the poetical novel’s ethical demands on the reader? What might reading as an ethical practice mean and entail? The dual aim situates this dissertation in an interdisciplinary field between ethics, literary studies and aesthetics. In this study despair is the fundament on which the ethical reader stands to approach literature. Rather than discovering meanings, finding examples, or experiencing empathy, it is being engaged in the conditions determined by suffering and injustice that constitutes ethical reading. The novels Drömfakulteten (The Dream Faculty) by Sara Stridsberg, Hevonen häst (Hevonen Horse) by Annika Korpi, Montecore by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and Personliga pronomen (Personal Pronouns) by Daniel Sjölin comprise the material for the study. They are analysed in terms of deconstructive hermeneutics. Theories brought to bear are primarily Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonial and Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenological thinking about ethics, together with ideas from, among others, Derek Attridge, Judith Butler, and Sara Ahmed. The readings of the novels are done via four points of entry: identity, the body, the human, and the post-political, as part of the project’s work process, with each reading leading to new questions and critical interventions. The analysis points to a responsibility in relation to identity, a practice where oneself is shifted and transformed. This responsibility also encompasses accountability for the normative orders that need to be changed. Literary projects per se cannot achieve this, but they can be read as a stab at resistance, material for the reader to elaborate upon. This responsibility is an ethical practice that is not completed, that has uncertainty inscribed in its very essence, and that is reinvigorated with each new reading.