Strindberg och den litterära gesten

Abstract

Strindberg and the Literary Gesture

During his lifetime August Strindberg was regularly criticised for his highly idiosyncratic writing. What contemporary critics disliked were not only Strindberg’s transgressions of traditional literary genres but also his tendency to blur the distinction between fiction and reality or, more specifically, between the private and the public. In recent years this “impure” writing has been studied by, among others, Per Stounbjerg and Ulf Olsson. From different theoretical angles both Stounbjerg and Olsson have argued that Strindberg’s works could not be reconciled with the general view of literary representation in Sweden at the turn of the century and therefore seemed “unreadable”. Leaning partly on their research, this article aims at introducing a new approach to the subjectivity in Strindberg’s writing. Combining Bertolt Brecht’s ideas of the dramatic gesture (“Gestus”) with J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, it presents the outlines of a study in which Strindberg’s texts are regarded as performances rather than representations. It also tries to demonstrate that the conflict between what could be called “the verbal dispute” and “the literary gesture” in Strindberg’s writing is of central importance to such a study.