<p>Trough the analyses of three young contemporary Swedish and Norwegian poets, who all in one way or another work with the language as material, I will circulate around the term language materialism. Each poet has his or her specific distinctive feature wich makes them three completely different poets. But they are all challenging the borders of literature and even the grammatical laws of language. Apart from the analyses I sketch an historical line between the predecessors of the experiments with the poetic language in the past, starting with Mallarmé, and the experiments of today. My essay will in conclusion discuss the language poetry in a wider philosophical point of view, connected to Derrida and Wittgenstein.</p><p>The first analysis introduces the author and artist Johannes Heldén through his debute poetry collection Burner. Heldéns way of combining a rather abstract intellectual and theory based form with graffiti as the main topic, results in a both direct and deep questioning of the structures of language and text. Close to Heldéns theme I see the thoughts of the french thinker Jacques Derrida, who also becomes the main point of departure for my own analysis. An especially important source for me has been Derrida’s essay Schibboleth, which forms itself to an introduction to the deconstruction theory through a careful reading of the poetry of Paul Celan. In this book we find a few terms which have been valuable in contact with the three poets I´ve chosen for this essay. The terms are: Crypt, ashes, date and wound (in my analyses wound also transforms to scars and marks or tracks). The most important meaning of these terms are the way in which Derrida sees the written word as always included in a play of references and meaning. As soon as we arrange words on a piece of paper some of the words will start to point backwards in time, other will point towards the future and many will as well indicate several contemporary directions the moment they are written. Text is in this sense not metaphysics, it is rather included in a play of meaning. Significant is also how text is doomed to encrypt itself in a way that leaves a wound that insinuates that here lays a hidden meaning. Hidden and impossible to trace. Especially in my analysis of Burner these terms have been suitable. Heldén creates a world underground, below the train tracks, which hide a world of graffiti. The graffiti in the normal, outside, world are often fragmentated, sometimes even wounded by the hands of humans. The picture of the cave full of language becomes the main focus in my analysis. The second analysis deals with the latest poetry collection of the Norwegian author Ingrid Storholmen, Skamtalen Graceland. The leading feature of this book is Storholmen’s way of showing the language’s visuality using different fonts and formations as well as marking a few words so that a scarred text appears.</p><p>The last analysis forms a close look at the poet Anna Hallbergs latest poetry collection På era platser. Hallberg has been a frontal figure for the genre of language poetry in Sweden. In connection to this analysis the thoughts of the early Wittgenstein becomes interesting, wherefore I also expand the discussion to include even some of his thoughts. The new and interesting point of view for the contemporary langauge focused poetry is the close contact to philosophy that manifests itself on the pages. Often it seems to me as if the poets of today wanted to contribute with a comment to the philosophical langauge debate from within the topic of the same debate, that is from the inside of poetry itself.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA/oai:DiVA.org:sh-294 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Schmidt, Lisa |
| Publisher | Södertörn University College, School of Gender, Culture and History, Huddinge : Institutionen för genus, historia, litteratur och religion |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, text |
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