Tystnadens spår : En läsning av tystnadens estetik och etik hos Mirjam Tuominen och Gunnar Björling

This bachelor thesis engages in the question of silence in the writings of Fenno-Swedish modernists Mirjam Tuominen and Gunnar Björling, silence being understood as both a poetic theme and a question of literary form. Alongside this exposition runs a discussion about the possibilities and impossibilities of interpretation in the field of academic literary studies. This query is connected to the different ideological positions of the two writers, conjoined by ideas about anti-comprehensibility. Considering certain weaknesses of classical hermeneutics as well as the theory of deconstruction, especially in the case of reading poetry, this thesis tries to point out possible routs for a practice of a more dynamic interpretation, with special regard to understanding the trope of silence in the modernist poetry of Tuominen and Björling. The composition explicitly applies a ”method of wandering” inspired by Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of the priests of Dionysus in Hölderlin’s writings – maundering in the holy night – as a metaphor for a critique-in-the-creating. This complies to Theodor W. Adorno’s idea of the aporetic situation of the interpreter and the unsolvable conflict between scientific discourse and art understood as a medium of truth in a more radical sense. The study aspires to perform a dialogue between different faculties of interpretation, and to make this dialogue viewable, so that the question of understanding remains ambiguous in line with the poetics of Tuominen and Björling. The results that follow bare the mark of aporia, but points towards a possible reading of silence (in Björling’s and Tuominen’s writings) as connected to a certain kind of sensibility and confidence in the immanence of truth in existence