Metafor - en metod att göra det privata personligt

Sammanfattning: In this study I have met three authors in a dialogue seminar on their literary work. The discussion, starting from texts by Lacan and Socrates, revolved around the dichotomy of personal and private, and how to benefit from personal material in one’s literary work. The three authors reflected on the writer Karl Ove Knausgård and the photographer Sally Mann, who both are working with their own immediate family as a motif. In Knausgård, you can find a strong and self-dissecting writer persona as a medium of creating recognition in the readers mind. In Sally Mann the metaphorical dimensions of this family motifs transforms them to images of much more general relevance than their private settings. On the subject of truth and story I also reflect on the different approaches that the authors Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl and Imre Kertész have on their experiences of the Holocaust. Finally the importance and relevance of metaphors as a way of getting a touch of one’s own private material is starting to be investigated.