Vondt, valdsamt, vedvarande. Teoretiske perspektiv på traume og traumelitteratur, og litterære analysar av Herbjørg Wassmos Huset med den blinde glassveranda, Per Pettersons I kjølvannet og Brit Bildøens Sju dagar i august

Abstract

Painful, violent, insidious. Theoretical perspectives on trauma and trauma literature, and literary analyses of Herbjørg Wassmo’s House with the blind glass windows, Per Petterson’s In the wake and Brit Bildøen’s Seven days in August Literary trauma studies examine how literature deals with different aspects of trauma and is characterized by a theoretical and thematical orientation towards trauma as a complex phenomenon and concept. Researchers within the field have a shared focus on questions of how various traumatic experiences, individual and collective, challenge language and how literature depict traumatic events and the effects of trauma. The field is developing rapidly and it is characterized by theoretical tensions, allowing a number of potential theoretical positions. Thus, this thesis follows a dual path. In the theoretical section, I discuss and define the concept of trauma, and questions regarding the relationship between trauma, language and literature, and I reflect on how cultural context influences how trauma is understood and interpreted. This theoretical discussion concludes in favour of an adoption of a flexible definition of trauma, to include a multitude of aesthetic forms, and to take the cultural context into consideration when analyzing trauma literature. This argument forms the theoretical foundation for my reading of trauma literature in this thesis, which I have used to analyze three contemporary Norwegian novels: Herbjørg Wassmo’s House with the blind glass windows, Per Petterson’s In the wake and Brit Bildøen’s Seven days in August. The central aim of the thesis is to contribute to new insights into the knowledge on the three novels, through three literary analyses in light of the forementioned theoretical discussions. The main focus of my literary analyses is on the literary depiction of the different traumas, both individual and collective, and on how collective traumas – the German occupation of Norway (in Wassmo’s novel), the arson fire on board the ship Scandinavian Star (in Petterson’s novel) and the terror attack on Oslo and Utøya (in Bildøen’s novel) – impact the individual and the collective. In addition, I have analyzed how the novels create literary configurations of these collective traumatic events of the past. This last approach, inspired by cultural memory studies, enables a comparison of how the three novels combine different modes of configuration, and how they challenge dominant narratives about the events.