The purpose of this study is to show what melancholy and irony in my poems express and what techniques that are used to accomplish these effects. Many theorists, among them Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, characterize melancholy as an experience of loss, and therefore one of my questions is what kind of losses appear in my poetry. In search for an answer I analyze the texts from both a psychoanalytic and a sociological point of view. In the latter perspective I discuss the postmodern society using concepts from contemporary thinkers like Zygmunt Bauman, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Finally, I also examine if melancholy has an influence on the form of the poems. The result of my investigation shows that the psychoanalytic perspecitve of Kristeva with great accuracy can predict the elements in melancholy poems but not provide interesting information about the cultural content in them. On the contrary, the sociological perspective shows a multitude of interesting connections between the feeling of loss in the poems and a dysfunctional society. My analysis also shows that both the melancholy and the irony in the poems are expressions of an alienation in a society that is characterized by an abundance of invading images, a rigid system of self control in an ”open society” and the extreme difficulty to plan for the future as a consequence of the ”unleashed market”. Furthermore, several poems have an abrupt irony in the ending and I establish that this technique has several functions in common with the parabasis in the comedy of the Greek Attic theatre. / Morgan Svensson

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