Möten utan förening - mot en omformulering av den romantiska berättelsen

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is firstly to demonstrate how an ideal of symbiosis permeates our cultures writing of love stories, and to demonstrate the oppressive mechanisms within this ideal. I suggest an ideal of symbiosis as being oppressive in itself, by placing it under the psychoanalytical subject-object paradigm, where the subject can never perceive of the other as anything but a rejected or incorporated part of itself. The symbiosis therefore demands subjugation; the symbiosis can never entail more than one subject. I thereafter propose the re-formulation of the symbiotic love story into an intersubjective love story, using the intersubjective perspective proposed by Jessica Benjamin. Other than solving the inherent inequality of the symbiosis, I argue that an intersubjective love story could uphold passion due to its anti-institutionality. I thereafter proceed to my empirical material – five Harlequin novels of the romance genre. Using Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, I contrast her using of the psychoanalytical theories of female personality development by Nancy Chodorow with the intersubjective perspective of Jessica Benjamin, to demonstrate how one of the novels of my material can be argued to be an intersubjective love story, while using the same basic narrative structure as the others.