"Verkligheten, som obarmhärtigt bröt ned hans konstruktioner” : En studie av Henry Parlands roman Sönder.

Sammanfattning: In this thesis the aim is to examine how objects matter with regards to orientation in the work To Pieces written by the Finnish author Henry Parland. The question posed by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology becomes the starting point of this work. The aim of returning to this question is to accentuate the role of objects in the process of orientation. More specifically how the things themselves make up the life-world, which can be described as a “coherency of things”. When the lifeworld and the subject is aligned the world is familiar and open. It becomes a world that lets the subject in question extend itself and act as it intends. When the orientation fails, the subject becomes disorientated, the world falls apart. The things are used as tools to extend the subject in its world. But things are not mere tools for the subject to extend itself with. The things can be seen as having agency, something that is examined through the theory of agential realism by Karen Barad. Here the agency of matter is examined in such a way that the binary opposition of subject-object is questioned. Instead Barad suggest that we return to the matter itself and examine how it intra-acts in such a way that the boundaries and entities are formed within the so-called phenomena. Together these two theories are put to work in the novel To Pieces which becomes a place for them to join together by showing how orientation is formed reciprocally in the subject-object discourse. The novel is full of human intra-action with things, be it mirrors, photografies, cigarettes, hats, or other humans who are reduced to objects. From here the things themselves set in motion a kind of revolution, which questions the anthropocentric order.