In Peter Weiss debut Från ö till ö (1947) the ‘I’ travels from island to island as a castaway. The island here can signify, or work as a synecdoche for exile and the feeling of isolation that exile often induces. But the movement from island to island also implies a restless state: Peter Weiss shifting from painting to writing to filmmaking and theatre, from German to Swedish and then back to German. The years during exile and the years that followed the exile until his breakthrough in Germany with Schatten des körpers des Kütchens (1960), Abschied von den Eltern (1961) and Fluchtpunkt (1962), were the formative years of Peter Weiss authorship. In Sweden he abandoned a Hesse-influenced new-romanticism – an aesthetical and political dead-end in the 1940s – and oriented towards the Swedish modernists – fyrtiotalisterna – discovered psychoanalysis and became politically “aware”. These happenings – or machines as this essay likes to view them – all influenced and produced Weiss Swedish prose which is this essay’s main focus. Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari this essay understands Weiss Swedish authorship as a minor authorship. As Franz Kafka was in the German language, Peter Weiss was a stranger in Swedish and in Sweden, a “foreign bird” as one critic calls him. As a minor writer he is a political writer, the political realities are connected to him, his half-Jewish body is intertwined in the (bio)political realities of mid-century Germany; and those realities are visible in his prose, even if he himself, or his contemporaries, see him as an unpolitical author. Therefore there is no unpolitical and political period in the œuvre of Peter Weiss. Instead there are different flows and movements, from the political, from the production of the psychoanalytic-, modernist- and romantic-machine among others. There are lines of flights, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This essay aims to follow some of these lines in the Swedish prose of Peter Weiss.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-257731 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Mats O, Svensson |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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