Författaren som forskare - tautologi eller självmotsägelse?

Hemer, Oscar; Lind, Torbjörn

My research project ‘The Truth of Fiction’ (Fiktionens sanning) poses a simple, vast question: What can fiction tell us about the world that journalism and academic prose cannot? I tackle it by exploring two specific cases, South Africa and Argentina, and the relationship between literary fiction and society’s dramatic, traumatic transformation in these two countries over the past two or three decades. One premise of mine has been to adopt, in my investigation, the author’s rather than the literary researcher’s stance. But what does it mean in practical terms? Can an author research his own occupation? Literature is itself, after all, a form of knowledge, but there are ample grounds for the assumption that authors themselves are the people least suited to analyse the literary aspects of their own works. Attempting, in praxis, to answer the question of what artistic research on literature is all about confronts me with the dilemma of finding a single form that may, in some sense, be described as matching the content of the investigation. This dilemma is presumably unresolved. The answer is a paradox — tautology and self-contradiction alike — and the form an impossibility. My preliminary solution is necessarily a compromise: a kind of academic journalistic essay, personal and subjective but with no element of fiction and fulfilling all the requirements of academic exactitude. My fundamental lesson from the ongoing knowledge process is that writing is the foremost method. I write my way through a field resembling Borge’s garden of forking paths, in which every reference leads to another and not always back to the main path. Where I ultimately end up, I know only when the writing is finished. So far, my bid to carry out artistic research has been reminiscent of my novel projects: they too have extended over several years and changed their guise in the course of the process. But the conclusions from this both banal and revolutionary insight remain to be drawn when I am done. And someone else, perhaps, should then draw them.

2010

http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-9047

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Applied Fine Performing Arts - Sweden - Malmö Högskola Applied Fine Performing Arts - Sweden Applied Fine Performing Arts catalog - mediathek catalog - network catalog - Artists catalog - HGK catalog - HGKplus

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AccessDate: 2021-12-21T15:04:35Z
BookTitle: Forkning och kritik. granskning och recension av konstnärlig forskning
DateAdded: 2021-12-21T15:04:35Z
DateModified: 2021-12-21T15:06:05Z
ISBN: 1652-8395
Key: RKB33YGG
Language: swe
LibraryCatalog: www.diva-portal.org
Pages: 101-108
Publisher: Vetenskapsrådet
Rights: Open Closed

- Applied Fine Performing Arts

Författaren som forskare - tautologi eller självmotsägelse?

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Författaren som forskare - tautologi eller självmotsägelse?

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