Krapula : Henry Parland och romanprojektet Sönder

Sammanfattning: The subject of the dissertation is the work of Henry Parland (1908-1930) during the last two years of his life. The main focus is on the novel Broken. (about developing Velox paper) and some essays about film and poetics. The introductory chapter discusses Parland's contributions to the magazine Quosego 1928-29 and his debut collection of poems, and the importance of Parland's criticism of Gunnar Björling's poetry is shown to be greater than has previously been recognized. The contacts between Parland and the Lithuanian literary scene 1929-30 are also delineated, as is the external history of the never completed novel project.Earlier criticism has given the picture that Parland was introduced to Russian Formalism by his uncle, Professor Wilhelm Sesemann, in 1929. This opinion is challenged in the second chapter, which analyses the differences between the ideas expressed in texts by Sesemann and in texts by Parland. It also argues that in the essay "Modernist Poetry from a Formalist Point of View" and other articles Parland shows a deep, but not extensive knowledge of Formalist thinking; the key concepts are taken from Literature and Cinema (1923) by Viktor Sklovskij.The third chapter consists of a reading of the novel Broken, posthumously published three times (1932, 1966, 4987). Here a new text is established and analysed. Broken is a metafiction about the writing of a novel of the same name. The intertextual relation to Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and the novel's use of the Formalist notion of ostranenie (enstrangement) and automatisation are foregrounded, which provides new explanations for and perspectives on the plot, the behaviour of the characters, and the devices of writing.