Anna Nygren

The deer, the girls, or play & fail

My research is a failed writer's failed attempt to become a literary scholar. I'm researching from the position of an amoeba in academia - at certain moments I claim to be a Trojan Horse, a Trixster, or something else subversive. But more often than not it just ends up being: failure. I write from a writing-reading position. Where my reading of literature is infiltrated by my writing practice. This exposition is based on my failed dissertation in literature, which I am now trying to recover in the form of an artistic research project. The literary dissertation is about Monika Fagerholm's novel "Who killed Bambi?" (2019), and my failure is the inability to be scientific and detached, to stay within the framework. In the exposition I examine this from a queer/lesbian and neuroqueer/autistic perspective. I start from an emotional (un)knowledge and try to distort ideas and boundaries between failure and play.

Biography

Anna Nygren is a PhD student in literature at Åbo Akademi, and a teacher of literary composition at Gothenburg University. She is part of the research project Autistiskt skrivande – att Ă„terta ett modersmĂ„l, funded by the Swedish Research Council (VetenskapsrĂ„det).