A “fucked up” novel, narratology, and the Difference approach to literary fiction
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Tommy Sandberg
Abstract
Drömfakulteten (2006) is an experimental novel by the Swedish writer Sara Stridsberg portraying the life of political activist and writer Valerie Solanas. I read Drömfakulteten as a “literary fantasy” where the forms, the themes, and the atmosphere are foregrounded rather than the biography of Solanas, and suggest that it can be viewed as a deliberate work of art filled with affordances for the reader. Central to my analysis is the recurring idea of “fucking up” as a way of disobeying social, political, and literary (narrative) norms. In relation to narratology, I take on the novel with a Difference approach to fiction, guided by notions from Sylvie Patron, Lars-Åke Skalin, and Richard Walsh. In this approach, fiction is seen as functioning differently in a qualitative sense compared to natural narrative. The Difference approach leads to a reading that lies close to the intuitions of reviewers and highlights the strong literary potential of the novel.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
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- Introduction: Experimental literature and narrative theory
- Perturbatory narration in literature und film
- Blocks to, and building blocks of, narrativity: Fragments, anecdotes, and narrative lines in David Markson’s Reader’s block
- Eighteen hours of salmon: On the narrativity of slow TV
- A “fucked up” novel, narratology, and the Difference approach to literary fiction
- Framing absence: A narratology of the empty page
- “Both close and distant”: Experiments of form and the medieval in contemporary literature
- Who says? Problematic narration in Paul Auster’s City of glass
- The Eventfulness of Non-Events in Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.”
- Fantastic reversals of time: Representations of ageing in the fantastic mode
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Introduction: Experimental literature and narrative theory
- Perturbatory narration in literature und film
- Blocks to, and building blocks of, narrativity: Fragments, anecdotes, and narrative lines in David Markson’s Reader’s block
- Eighteen hours of salmon: On the narrativity of slow TV
- A “fucked up” novel, narratology, and the Difference approach to literary fiction
- Framing absence: A narratology of the empty page
- “Both close and distant”: Experiments of form and the medieval in contemporary literature
- Who says? Problematic narration in Paul Auster’s City of glass
- The Eventfulness of Non-Events in Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.”
- Fantastic reversals of time: Representations of ageing in the fantastic mode
