This Master’s thesis explores three contemporary Swedish poets’ – Lars Mikael Raattamaa, Anna Hallberg and Johan Jönson – understanding of their work as a political activity. By using Jonathan Culler’s theory on literary competence and literary conventions as a theoretical tool for an idea analysis, the three poets' arguments for or against certain literary techniques, and their ideas about readers and reading, are explored and discussed. In what ways are established literary methods questioned by the three poets? In what ways are established theories on readers and reading questioned? In what way can their poetic work be regarded as political? As a background, the debate about poetry in Swedish newspapers and literary magazines is presented, as well as the common focus on readers and reading in social sciences and in humanities and arts. The trend is to interpret the reader as active and creative. Following this trend, and surpassing it, the three Swedish poets challenges established literary techniques and established theories on readers and reading. The ideas of the three poets can be summarized as follows: The poet must be very conscious about different literary techniques and their effects. Poetry and literature must not be written in ways that is hierarchic or undemocratic. That is: literary competence is actually not important. The meaning of the poem or the text is in the mind of the reader, not in the mind of the poet or the writer. The poets aim and goal must be to write a kind of poetry that is accessible to all people, unregarded literary competence or such things as literary conventions. / Uppsatsnivå: D

This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.