Écriture féminine moving towards Others writing: A close reading of Mara Lee’s literary figuration strategies and the Other in Kärleken och hatet (2018) This essay examines how Mara Lee re-negotiates écriture féminine through an artistic writing practice from a contemporary horizon of queer-theory and post-colonial perspectives on the immanent power structures of language. Arguing for the relevance of écriture féminine as an entry to understand the figurations of the Other, through the similar literary strategies that navigates past the repressive and subordinating structures of language. Using Mara Lee’s thesis När Andra skriver (2014) to approach and display the literary figuration strategies of the Other at work in her poetic text Kärleken och hatet. Departing from écriture féminine Lee re-use and add to the defining features that operate through a critique of the binary system of language and the notion of uniform meaning. Lee presents time as a new perspective to negotiate the old concepts and puts temporalization into practice as a strategy to elude the double bind of difference. The common tendency of Lee’s literary strategies works through a subversive opening of the language, dislocating, shifting, and forcing it into motion. Lee displays how motion precludes stagnation, binary conceptions, and stereotype images. By using metaphors and imagery with multiplying, moving, and floating qualities as a way to return to and invoke the body Lee brings forward the subordinated experience. The body works as a common denominator for both the Other and the female experience of historically being reduced and referred to primarily as object and body rather than subject. Intertextuality, autofiction, and rebellious crossing of genres, mixing different styles of text, and refusing to conform to the expected linear narrative is another defining aspect of écriture féminine that echoes in Lee’s work. Kärleken och hatet departs from the poetic format and uses an extensive number of intertextual references that activate the infinite textual potential and destabilize uniform meaning as it continues towards other literary contexts. Through subjectivity and the fragmented, non-uniform subject Lee aligns with the strategies of écriture féminine while giving voice to the lived bodily experience of the Other. The spiral works as a returning yet opening motion through the metaphorical imagery and the narrative as repetition with a slight shift that re-negotiates the production of meaning. With this spiraling motion, Lee addresses revolutionary time and enforces a return to the repressed experience of the body while insisting on difference as a continuous process.

The purpose with this essay is to investigate how different theories about literary competence can help us understand why Sven Delblanc’s novel Änkan and Mara Lee’s novel Ladies have generated so many various interpretations as they have. To fulfill this purpose a comparative study of book reviews about the two novels Änkan and Ladies has been made. The theories about literary competence that have been used in this study are Joseph Appleyard’s theory about reader-roles, Judith Langer’s theory about imaginary worlds and Magnus Persson’s theory about genre perspectives. The results that are presented in this study are that those book reviews that express expectations about the novels as being genre-typical are often more disappointed about the reading experience than those readers who have expectations about the novels as being genre-transgressing and with deeper meaning. The discussion about genres has therefore given an interesting perspective about the correlation between the readers’ expectations and the many, various interpretations that follow.