UC Berkeley

Grammatical Claustrophobia unfolds the gendered interplay of reception and expression in a cluster of female-authored texts from 1968-1972, which are preoccupied with the politics of despair’s artistic representation. I consider four works from this period: Tove Ditlevsen’s Ansigterne (1968), Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971), and Chantal Akerman’s Saute ma ville (1968) and La Chambre (1972), as well as a contemporary novel, Olga Ravn’s Celestine (2015). My analysis pivots on despair—an affect associated with critical theory and high modernism on the one hand and the domestic claustrophobia of middle and working class women on the other. As women authors working through the 1960s and 1970s, Ditlevsen, Bachmann, and Akerman were, to differing degrees within their own national traditions, trapped between the high-modernist literary and cultural establishments that never fully accepted them on the one hand, and the artistic and popular feminist movements that they only ambivalently accepted on the other. I argue that this dynamic triggers what I call “grammatical claustrophobia” within these texts, which can be understood both analytically and sociohistorically as a matter of pragmatics and metapragmatics.

Grammatical claustrophobia is both an affect and a figure, which I suggest functions formally to provide tonal structure (Ngai 2016; Felski 2008); sociologically, as an index for contemporary, gendered norms of artistic and social discourse (Goffman 1967; Bourdieu 2001; Durkheim 2014; Lucey and McEnaney 2017; Lucey 2019); and tropologically, as a proliferation of shared figures by and through which literary and film-historical lineages can be made and unmade (Foucault 2007; White 2020). Read in this way, grammatical claustrophobia works as a site of canon formation and revision, which can be used to engage and potentially unhinge high-literary and philosophical affects, such as despair, from their gendered contexts. My aim, therefore, is both to nuance dominant conceptions of female-authored texts and authors in their given national literary and cultural imaginations, and also to account for the role of form in the movement of affect between cultural productions and the publics they represent and generate.

Taking grammatical claustrophobia as a charged locus of literary and film history, each of the first three chapters reframes dominant understandings of these works in their national traditions, accounting for points of cultural, linguistic, and medial difference. In response to the gendered and biographically-inflected reception of these authors, I interweave narratological, philosophical and sociological analyses to read these texts both formally, as artistic productions in their own right, and historically, as responses to the gendered biases of their contemporary societies and literary establishments.

In my opening chapter on Ditlevsen’s Ansigterne (The Faces), I draw on Søren Kierkegaard’s (1849) existentialist account of despair and Erving Goffman’s (1967) sociological analysis of “face-work” to parse the novel’s affective and representational systems. I argue that Ditlevsen’s employment of the facial trope is rooted as much in a lineage of existential discourse and expressionist art production as it is in the gendered construction of female identity in its contemporary Denmark. In Bachmann’s Malina, which I discuss in the second chapter, this dually grammatical and corporeal claustrophobia takes on linguistic features, which can be read both in relation to the novel’s engagement with ordinary language philosophy and especially the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the problem of identity in postwar Vienna. In light of G.E.M Anscombe’s (1981) provocative claim that the first-person pronoun refers to nothing “at all,” I argue that Bachmann’s use of a nameless first-person narrator underscores how social conditions of gender and sexuality amplify the affective intensity of this lack. The third chapter, on Akerman’s Saute ma ville and La Chambre, brings together these various manifestations of claustrophobia—grammatical, corporeal, linguistic, and figural—under the heading of tropological enclosure. Turning to film, we see the collision of form visually rendered as a means of both entrapment and expression. Looking at these films in the context of contemporaneous feminist film and visual art by Yvonne Rainer and Louise Bourgeois, the psychoanalytic framework of the uncanny (Freud 1919), and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) discussion of the “body without organs,” I examine how historically-embedded tropes of femininity, such as homemaking and cosmetic care, impede the affective and artistic expression of subjecthood.

The last chapter of the dissertation jumps forward in time to a recent Danish novel, Olga Ravn’s Celestine (2015). Here, I outline how the affective and analytical work of reframing done by the first three chapters can take place intertextually in a work of fiction. I trace a possible way to “come out” of grammatical claustrophobia by using drag as a figure of literary-historical engagement (Freeman 2010; Butler 2011; Foucault 2007). The chapter is divided into a series of tropes—walls, mirrors, goo, and glitter—through which I argue the novel attaches itself to a lineage of women’s writing, including the work of Ditlevsen and Bachmann, at the same time as it intervenes in the literary-critical conception of the texts and authors it engages. In other words, and by way of conclusion, this last chapter considers how a queer-feminist metapragmatics of citation might be activated in our present moment not only to steer away from the suicidal trajectories of Ansigterne, Malina, and Saute ma ville—and of Ditlevsen, Bachmann, and Akerman—but also to develop a more fine-tuned conception of postwar European literary, film and intellectual history and the concepts through which it is constructed.

Grammatical Claustrophobia focuses on a specific set of texts drawn from a specific time and place. As a concept, it is particularly useful for describing works such as Ditlevsen’s, Bachmann’s and Akerman’s, in which the female-coded architecture of domesticity collides with the gendered conditions of authorship in the context of late twentieth-century Europe. At the same time, and because grammatical claustrophobia is in part defined by the intersection of marginal and dominant subject positions, my dissertation develops a bundle of literary-analytical concepts and methods that can be used to approach other texts and authors, whose work has been reductively read or conceptualized on the basis of minoritizing discourse. My project thus contributes broadly to studies of literary, film and intellectual history in its work to understand and critically engage the ways in which textual constellations, lineages, and canons are and can be made, sustained, and remade.