Ett språk, ett spår : En studie i Birgitta Trotzigs författarskap

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the dissertation is to investigate central and meaning producing themes in the oeuvre of the Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (born 1929). From a phenomenological viewpoint the oeuvre is seen as a totality, a life world, where the self, the world and language are interwoven in the act of literary expression. The phenomenological analysis focuses on repetitive elements in the texts, thus aiming to uncover the original experience that constitutes the productive point of departure of the oeuvre.The first chapter investigates the expressing self of the imaginary life world. In the act of expression, taking place in a common language characterised by intersubjectivity, the self endeavours to transcend its limitations and to establish contact with the other. This project of self-negation is prevented by the very act of self-expression, which inevitably contains traces of the expressing self. Similarly, the world in which the self exists contains traces of an expressive act: the utterance of the divine Word (chapter II). The corporeal, absolute and historicising temporality that structures these remaining traces of expression is discussed in the third chapter. The fourth chapter analyses the realisation of the above thematic structures in Sjukdomen (The Disease, 1972).The second part undertakes an investigation of Trotzig’s aesthetic practice. The oeuvre continually reflects on its own nature as products of writing, thus internalising temporality in their materiality. The sign of the text, emblematically epitomised in the dead body of Christ, constitutes a material residue of its own production. The oeuvre is characterised by a melancholic mode of production that keeps returning to the same themes, i.e., the trace, the wound and the sign, thus constituting the oeuvre as residue. This pivotal characteristic of the oeuvre harbours a promise of resurrection: the reader may revive the residual sign and restore its meaning.