Att tala utan språk : Om kön och trauma i Ingeborg Bachmanns roman Malina

Sammanfattning: This essay analyzes the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971) from two theoretical perspectives: Freudian trauma theory and poststructuralist feminism, as formulated by Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). Both of these standpoints manages to explain one of the main issues in Malina, that is, how to give voice to that which escapes language. By arguing that the nameless narrator, Ich (I), has been traumatized by patriarchal structures, I show how these perspectives complement rather than exclude each other. Together they manage to give a new and more complete picture of the struggle for language depicted in the novel.