Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Elfriede Jelinek und Thomas Bernhard: Intertextualität—Korrelationen—Korrespondenzen ed. by Bastian Reinert and Clemens Götze

2021; Austrian Studies Association; Volume: 54; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/oas.2021.0017

2327-1809

Jinsong Chen,

Reviewed by: Elfriede Jelinek und Thomas Bernhard: Intertextualität—Korrelationen—Korrespondenzen ed. by Bastian Reinert and Clemens Götze Jinsong Chen Bastian Reinert and Clemens Götze, eds., Elfriede Jelinek und Thomas Bernhard: Intertextualität—Korrelationen—Korrespondenzen Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte 154 Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019. 274 pp. Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, two controversial and highly acclaimed writers in the German-speaking world, have much in common. Both have a love-hate relationship with their home country, both offer poeticized provocations of the media and postwar political discussions, both put forward a critique of Austria's active involvement with National Socialism that positions their (respective) literary output as the definitive anti-Heimat literature and strengthens their (respective) reputation as "Nestbeschmutzer/in" as well as enfant terrible. Comparative studies on the writings of Jelinek and Bernhard have increased over the last two decades. This collection, published on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Bernhard's death and fifteen years after Jelinek's receipt of the Nobel Prize, gathers together a variety of engaged and in-depth literary studies on similarities and differences between both writers. Until now, such studies have been quite rare ("auffallend selten," 1). The work includes [End Page 151] a useful introduction, followed by Jelinek's short obituary for Bernhard (Der Einzige und wir, sein Eigentum) and sixteen scholarly essays divided into four sections/parts: "Verortungen," "Schreibweisen," "Gegenwärtige Vergangenheit," and "Räumlichkeiten." The first section begins with Fatima Naqvi's examination of how the two authors mediate between reality and its representation in their works and how they present reality and transform the real world in their writings. Paola Bozzi explores their literary correspondence and their use of language for rhetorical Dankesreden, as seen in their characteristic Georg Büchner Prize acceptance speeches. Rita Svandrlik investigates Bernhard's use of authentic details from Ingeborg Bachmann's life in his fictional novel Auslöschung, which counters Jelinek's more ambivalent and symbolic representation of Bachmann in her play Die Wand. Manfred Jurgensen draws on Jelinek's powerful artistic language and forms of expression to distinguish her from Bernhard, whose language is more alienating, inconsistent, and subjectively refined to create irony and satire. Harald Gschwandtner attempts to find a correlation between the two writers through an examination of their respective autonomy relative to their counterparts within the Austrian-German literary circle. Bernhard Sorg's contribution opens the second section, "Schreibweisen," that focuses on the two authors' poetological approaches. With his detailed analysis on Jelinek's novel Lust and Bernhard's fiction Frost, Sorg addresses the transcendental principle of art, reading both texts as poetical constructions of two different aesthetic subjects. Verena Meis focuses on their theatrical works, pointing out that Jelinek's poetological manner places emphasis on language and the text itself, while Bernhard stresses his own power over his text and its characters. Clemens Götze's masterful contribution focuses on the writers' Interviewkunst, the way their media images function as self-styled provocateurs. Driven by the motif of personal negativity and responsive to the stimulus of provocation, in their interviews both authors become projections of literary figures integrated in their postwar writings. Antonia Egel's inquiry also deals with Jelinek's and Bernhard's dramatic works; the writers' design and use of a dramatical chorus suggests that theater as an aesthetic space can transcend familiar boundaries and enclose the performance in a new and different way. Although Austria's guilt and the haunting specter of fascism in works by both writers have been intensively and extensively criticized since the 1980s, [End Page 152] the subsequent section provides some surprisingly new perspectives on what is already a heated debate. The four essays in this part, "Gegenwärtige Vergangenheit," deal with cultural memory. Gerhard Scheit's research on the individual or collective unconscious in remembering or negating the past investigates Austria's problematic involvement with National Socialism. In Jan Süselbeck's study, Kaprun, a disaster site that took the lives of 155 people in 2000, is used as a topography of the memory of the burned Jews of Auschwitz. The new crime scene of Kaprun is transposed into the literary/theatrical settings of Bernhard's...