Att skriva gränserfarenheter. En studie i Åsa Nelvins och Eva Runefelts författarskap

Abstract

Abstract The late 1970’s through the early 1980’s was an exciting and eventful period in Swedish literary history. Not only did the controversial and highly debated political women’s lit- erature emerge during this time, but also, simultaneously, new expressive forms began to take shape. In particular, young women writers appeared to take Swedish literature and poetry into new aesthetic directions, exploring questions regarding experience and language. This thesis centres on the study of the writings of Åsa Nelvin (1951–1981) and Eva Runefelt (b. 1953). The two writers, who were also friends, were regarded as two of Swedish literature’s most interesting names in prose and poetry respectively during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Yet, due to literary history’s tendency to create a sharp divide between a political yet aesthetically naïve 1970’s and a theoretically stringent but less political 1980’s, they tend to appear as somewhat peripheral figures. This study intends to demonstrate that Nelvin and Runefelt transcend the presumptive strong divide between the two literary decades. Inspired by post critical perspectives, mainly the assertion that literature can be philosophically interesting, this thesis highlights a set of linguistic problems articulated through Nelvin’s and Runefelt’s works concerning what Michel Foucault has termed limit experience. The study explores how Nelvin in her two most significant works of literature, the novel Tillflyktens hus, eller en f.d. inneboendes erinran (1975) and her only and post- humously published work of poetry Gattet: sånger från barnasinnet (1981) brings to the fore the experience of madness, and how she attempts various literary strategies to give that limit experience shape and form. Runefelt’s writing is more diverse, at least in regard to themes. In her earlier works of poetry, En kommande tid av livet (1975), Åldriga och barnsliga trakter (1978), Augusti (1981), and Längs ett oavslutat ögonblick (1986), Runefelt constantly reaches for the limits of language. Whether in a poem about the juncture between dream and wakefulness, or a more defining limit experience such as the moment between life and death, Runefelt stretches her phenomenologically informed poetic language beyond the point of reason to create logically impossible, yet poetically and affectively charged expressions. Runefelt’s later works, however, and especially her later works of poetry Mjuka mörkret (1997), I djuret (2001), and I ett förskingrat nu (2007) are centred around one dominant theme, death. Beginning with a series of texts written in memory of Nelvin, whose premature death occurred in 1981, Runefelt’s later writing takes a turn towards mourning and the dead. The study highlights how Runefelt’s later poetry, with one foot in elegiac myth and the other in a form of phenomenological poetics, constantly contests the limits of death, and furthermore attempts to make the paradoxical experience of being dead accessible to the living through her writing.