This essay analyzes the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971) from two theoretical perspectives: Freudian trauma theory and poststructuralist feminism, as formulated by Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). Both of these standpoints manages to explain one of the main issues in Malina, that is, how to give voice to that which escapes language. By arguing that the nameless narrator, Ich (I), has been traumatized by patriarchal structures, I show how these perspectives complement rather than exclude each other. Together they manage to give a new and more complete picture of the struggle for language depicted in the novel. / <p>Godkänt datum 2021-06-01</p>

Despite being an equal in the most significant partnership in British cinema, Emeric Pressburger has largely been overshadowed by his long term collaborator Michael Powell in both critical and academic studies. While there have been countless books on Powell and Pressburger as a team, those who have sought to separate the partnership have, until now, focussed almost exclusively on Powell. This thesis will attempt to redress the balance within Powell and Pressburger scholarship and attempt to break away from director-centric film studies. It will aim to examine Pressburger’s morally ambiguous characters, such as the recurring “good German” and his propensity to humanise characters who would normally be termed evil or corrupt, in conjunction with the central themes of displacement and exile within Pressburger’s screenplays and novels. The thesis will also utilise both unpublished and unfilmed material and demonstrate that the study of these works that exist only in archives provide a greater insight into the working practises of authors and filmmakers, while providing a valuable point of comparison to their more widely known works. Specifically, this thesis will address four separate aspects of Pressburger’s canon. First, it will discuss Pressburger’s war films which he made with Powell, which have suffered to an extent from neglect by many Archers’ scholars. It is clear that Pressburger’s key hallmarks and mirroring of his own experiences during the war can be seen to develop within these works and provide an ideal point of comparison with that of his later projects such as his novels. Chapter two will then examine the often overlooked filmed operetta, <i>Oh ... Rosalinda!! </i>(1955) along with Pressburger’s unfilmed screenplay <i>The Golden Years</i> (1951) a biopic of Richard Strauss, and provide a comparison to demonstrate the manner in which Pressburger’s love of opera overlapped with his development of complex characters and response to the war. Chapter three will analyse Pressburger two published novels, both of which have been largely ignored by both cinema and literary critics. Through the study of these novels, the difference in approach after the transition from screenwriter to novelist will be examined, along with the further development of his seeming neutrality in the portrayal of morally unsound characters. Chapter four will then focus on Pressburger’s two unpublished novels, <i>The Unholy Passion</i> and <i>A Face like England</i>, with consideration of Pressburger’s developing ideas of morality and forgiveness in his later years. In conclusion, by closely examining works that have been overlooked by Powell and Pressburger scholars, the thesis will shed new light on Pressburger, both as a filmmaker and an author and demonstrate the complexities of both his characters and his writing.

This study is a thematic-descriptive investigation of the reproduction and transformation of norms in the theoretical discourse on the novel during the 1960s. Primary literature consists of articles and essays published in West German literary and cultural journals 1959-1967. The term ‘discourse’ is applied partly in accordance with Busse/Hermanns/Teubert (1994), the term ‘theory of the novel’ chiefly in accordance with Lämmert (ed. 1984). ‘Ideology’ is not used in the sense of ‘false ideology’ but rather as an umbrella term for various types of value-related statements. From this, the theory-of-the-novel discourse is perceived as an aesthetic-ideological discourse, containing statements directed at the contemporary novel which have clear programmatic function and significant thematic width. The objective of the investigation is to show that specific comprehensive thematic fields – Werteverlust (breakdown and loss of values), Subjektproblematik (‘problematisation of the concept of the subject’), Sprachproblematik (language related problems) and Realitätszerfall (reality loss, breakdown of the reality concept) – bear discursive significance as regards the discussion of literary norms during the 1960s, and that this discussion realises itself as two aesthetic-ideological discourses competing for interpretative precedence. The major issues are: Which reiterated patterns of argumentation, i.e. norm-related categories, concepts and rhetorical patterns, are used in the discourses for diagnoses and programmatic imperatives? How are the comprehensive thematic fields accentuated? What is treated, postulated or set aside as ‘truth’? How - based on the above – is the novel formulated as a ‘problem’ (‘crisis of the novel’)? The investigation confirms that the comprehensive thematic fields are particularly central to the theoretical discussion of literature in the 1960s. This manifests itself as a discursive re-evaluation process which may be characterised as a conflict between an ‘aesthetic-conservative discourse’ and a ‘discourse of change’ (‘Veränderungsdiskurs’) where the right to define and evaluate the novel in terms of literature is at stake. It is in the collision between these two discourses and their largely incompatible concepts of literature that the novel discursively becomes a ‘problem’. The discourses are maintained by specific reiterated patterns of argumentation which in the investigation are subsumed under the following headings: die negative Modernität (negative modernity), das bloß Moderne (phenomena of ‘fashionable character’, simply expressing trends) and das Überzeitliche und das Ganze (the timeless and the totality); respectively die traditionelle, bürgerliche Gesellschaft (traditional bourgeois society), die technisch-sprachliche Realität (technolinguistic reality) and der subjektive, sprachliche Realitätsausschnitt (‘subjective language based slice of reality’). The first group of argumentation patterns is linked to universal, ‘eternal’ and essential categories and inherited norms, ethical-aesthetical educational grounding and a ‘rhetoric of the spirit’ or of ‘mankind’, oriented around a specific reception of German Classicism and Idealism, a downgrading of the present and an upgrading of the past. The other group embraces an incipient constructivism, contextually bound and societal categories and norms as well as implicitly critical programmes of enlightenment, devaluing the past and ‘acknowledging’ rather than criticising the present. In doing so they tend rather to realise a rhetoric of the linguistic and political reality and of more modest programmatic proposals.

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During the communist era in Romania the literature and its authors had been under pressure of normative demands, which substantially restricted freedom of writing. The authors tried to escape the official socialist realism and restore the esthetic function of literature. In the introduction chapter of this work this evolution is described. One of the authors trying to restore the esthetic function of Romanian prose in the 60s was Petru Popescu inspired by the urban background and American literature. His novels express the emotions of the Romanian post-war young generation. Although being successful in his homeland he emmigrated to the USA in 1974, where he made a career as an English writing scenarist and novelist. Other chapters of this thesis describe his work from his poetic debut until his latest work. They reflect the changes in his choices of topics and narrative methods applying the F. K. Stanzel's literary theory. One of the chapters deals with general questions related to exile, writer's identity, selection of the languages and adaptation strategies. Key words: monograph, post-war literature, exile literature, communist regime, July Thesis, Ceaușescu's regime, bilingualism, popular fiction, narrator's role, fiction and non-fiction, adaptation, identity, creative nonfiction