Konstnärlig forskning = poetik? En studie av de första doktorsavhandlingarna i litterär gestaltning i relation till poetiken som litterär tradition och modern genre

Abstract

In an article published in the Swedish Research Council’s Artistic Research Yearbook from 2004, the author and literary scholar Gunnar D Hansson indicated that artistic research in literary composition is comparable to or even synonymous with poetics. In light of such a comparison, this essay seeks to examine how the first four Swedish dissertations in literary composition can be said to practice poetics. Poetics, understood as both a discipline and a genre, has been subject to literary scientific research in Denmark in ways that have not occurred either in Sweden or internationally. A recent dissertation, published by the Danish literary scholar Michael Kallesøe Schmidt, extensively discusses modern, self-reflexive poetological texts by Danish authors with the ambition of coining a new genre: “authors’ poetics”. Since the literary dissertations are situated on the border between composition and reflection in ways similar to the Danish authors’ poetics, this essay examines the dissertations in relation to Schmidt’s genre-defining criteria, as well as the broader discussions surrounding poetics in both a Danish and a Swedish context. Just as for the younger, modern, poetological texts that Schmidt addresses, the dissertations are definable by their rhetorical characteristics – i.e., their self-reflexive speech act – their oscillation between artistic practice and theoretical reflection, their intertextual relations which transcend borders between aesthetic epochs and contexts, and their hybrid compositions. The dissertations also share semantic characteristics with the authors’ poetics by discussing similar poetological questions originating from a romantic and/or modernist aesthetic discourse. But unlike the authors’ poetics, the dissertations are academic products, and they share connections with disciplinary poetics and traditional academic writings that poetological texts situated outside the institutional realm of artistic research do not. I therefore argue that the first four literary dissertations can be said to create a new poetological spectrum, describes as a disciplinary form of authors’ poetics.