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The paper deals with the most famous novel by the Austrian author Charles Sealsfield (1793-1864) Das Cajütenbuch oder Nationale Charakteristiken (1843). By analyzing this novel as a camoufl aged story about personal, individual development (Entwicklungsgeschichte) and a discussion of homoerotic intimacy, the paper off ers a new view of this well-known novel by Charles Sealsfield.
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The concept of ‘ornament’ has an important role in the work of the Austrian writer Hermann Broch. For him this concept subsumes a historically complete depiction of a particular period and its style, autopian unity of an all-encompassing value system. Broch‘s ornamentis a cognitive concept too. The paper studies how this concept helps organize narrative structures in the trilogy of novels The Sleepwalkers. Another aspect under scrutiny is how the ornament facilitates cross-media transfer (for example between the media platforms of the opera, the theatre, the church, and in architecture).
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This paper summarizes the mediation activities of Heinrich Herbatschek (1877 Vsetín — 1956 Vienna) in both Czech- and German-language environments between Vienna, Moravia and Prague. The author concludes that Herbatschek saw the potential of this mediation especially in the cultural field, putting it in more or less sharp contrast to the antagonistic political discourse. Systems of ideas compatible with this basic attitude were pacifism, for example (the essay Unser Seelenleben im Völkerkriege, 1915), and apolitical socialism (e.g. essays in the cosmopolitan magazine Die Wahrheit in Brno around 1920). Above all, however, it presented a fundamental criticism of strategies of othering based on national self-identification (as in the Moravian novel Ist die Liebe tot?, 1921). We find this ethos, which Herbatschek came to embrace as a student and translator of Masaryk (Die Ideale der Humanität, 1902), across the various spheres of cultural and social life that Herbatschek engaged in, which is to say as translator and reviewer of Czech modernism in the early 20th century, as a networker, writer and publisher in the German-Czech Committee and the Moravian Club in Vienna on the eve of World War I, as chairman of the Austrian-Czechoslovak Society and publisher of its magazine Der Nachbar (1929–1936), and as promoter of tourism between Austria and Czechoslovakia
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The article examines the role of Rilkeʼs panther in Marica Bodrožićʼs Pantherzeit, an essay about the first corona lockdown in spring 2020. The approach is based on the methods of cultural animal studies. What can human-animal relationships contribute to understanding exceptional situations and crises such as the Covid19 pandemic? To answer this question, Bodrožićʼs panther is examined in terms of its contextualization, historicization and poetization. It becomes clear that human-animal relationships that deviate from conventional, anthropocentric readings can trigger a reorganization of self-images, identities and attitudes towards life.
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The Michael Haneke’s movie, based on the novel The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, is a remarcable illustration of the object-man metaphor, a metaphor marking the road of the identitary degeneration into an apathic and thrilling mecanism of daily automatisms which destroy the intimacy and the perception of corporality. Using a series of filming procedures based on silence and lack of dynamism, the Austrian director creates a pinning of the actual human in the middle of a self-destructive and unemotional universe.
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The novel „The Wall” („Die Wand”, 1963) by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer (1920-1970) is analyzed from the perspectives of modern literary anthropology. Attention is focused on the poetics of everyday life and the ways of communication during total isolation. The phenomenon of the barrier that separates the nameless first-person narrator from the usual coexistence with people is considered. The gradual reception of a conditional wall with certain stages is emphasized: identification through naming, state of fear and impulse to destroy an object, its visualization (finding of a material form), equating it to a weapon of mass destruction and consciously ignoring the irritant. The adaptation means of the female protagonist to the new reality with the opposition „city-village”, and „man-animal” are studied. The poetics of everyday life is clearly demonstrated in the detailed daily routine with the adaption of home (a hunting lodge with outbuildings and a mountains hut), the struggle for the harvest of potatoes and legumes, hunting for wild animals and caring for domestic animals, hay and firewood harvesting for the winter.
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The research deals with the issue of genre hybridization in the novel “Silence – Chronicle of a Killer” written by a contemporary Austrian writer Thomas Raab. An examination of the novel's composition and structure, as a text in motion, has been accomplished in the article. The novel “Silence” is an excellent illustration of how the genre of adventure has been adapted to include elements of science fiction. This novel is a love tale, a rural life saga, a formation narrative, and a psychological thriller all in one. As a fictionalized account of the life of a serial murderer with hypersensitive hearing who became a legend for his mental torment and suffering, it serves both as a biography and a thriller. Novelist Raab uses elements from classic horror novels like Frankenstein, German romantics, in particular, G. Kleist, the tale of Casper Hauser, and detective novels like Friedrich Durrenmatt's "Promise" to tell the story of Casper Hauser's disappearance in his book. A new aesthetic experience may be formed at various degrees of identification ranging from naive perception to higher levels of literary reception. Concentration is required for poetic and philosophical substance. Michel Focalut's nomadism, marginality, and authoritarian power rhetoric have been discussed in this article. The novel's ultimate content has been disclosed as the aphesis torment, emotional sublimation, as the birth of an artwork and, at the same time, death of the author, who exposes discourses, accountable for creating texts that are allocated to him.
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In his novel Mensch gegen Mensch (1919), the Austrian writer Ernst Weis opens the door to the figure of a doctor for the first time. The diseases that Weis works with here are not only the fruit of the “writer’s imagination” but almost clearly mapped images from the conventional medicine books as well as the very experiences that Weis acquired during his education and later practice as a surgeon in Vienna and Prague. In the novel Mensch gegen Mensch, the writer introduces the hero Alfred to the world of the Second Viennese Medical School, which on the one hand stands in the service of humans, and on the other excludes all that is not material: sensitivity and ultimately the very “soul”. While the clinical view focuses on the human body as the subject of research, the literary text puts humans at the centre of events and tries to expose what is invisible to the naked eye: the human psyche. Questions arise as to how Weis portrays the early 20th-century medical discourse in the novel and what role he attributes to medicine in the research and understanding of a human.
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The present article examines the different forms of reception that can be observed in Bulgaria with regard to two of the most significant Austrian authors of the second half of the 20th century and of the 21st century. The starting point for the study is the attempt to reconstruct the effort of the translators. The available data are summarised and the names of the key participants in this process are highlighted. The next step is the attempt to find and analyse other forms of reception of these authors and to establish the factors that favour literary transfer from one language to another and from one national literature to another, so that foreign language authors can participate in the cultural context of the target language, in this case Bulgarian.
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Doktor Hoechst by Robert Menasse (staged in 2009 and published in 2013) is a “Faust-Play” (subtitle) dense with references and allusions to Goethe’s Faust, whose purpose is not so much to provide a contemporary reinterpretation of the Faustian myth, but rather a Faustian interpretation of contemporaneity. This contribution will investigate the convergences that arise between this reinterpretation, charged with tensions with the present, and the theme of memory – a memory that, although it does not belong to the source text, is overwritten on it, reactivating some essential meanings.
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The paper addresses the work of an enfant terrible of the post-war Austrian culture, Thomas Bernhard, by posing questions about the relation between veridiction and a proper Nestbeschmuzung. Bernhard was frequently downplayed as a sarcastic and spiteful madman who drew sick pleasure from insulting his community. Nonetheless, as I demonstrate in the paper, the unveiling of systemic violence in Bernhard’s oeuvre reaches much deeper than just paresia. Bernhard’s prose has a structure of the fugue in which protagonists struggle with their own subjectification and objectification. It is precisely this structure of the fugue that possesses unmasking and paresiastic functions that go beyond the role of insults which make up a good part of the content this structure gives a form to. Ultimately, the fugue is a strategy to counter the overwhelming power and seek the subjectification outside of its realm.
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In his novel Der Fliegenpalast, Walter Kappacher, an expert on and admirer of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, drew on his profound knowledge of Hofmannsthal’s work, as well as researching extensively on the author and his time. This resulted in a dense fabric of intertextual references to both Hofmannsthal’s work and his reading. Interwoven with this biographical narration is a broad socio-historic panorama of the first decades of the 20th century in Austria. An analysis of the construction of seemingly self-evident Austrian references proves that this novel can only be adequately analyzed and interpreted in the context of Austrian political as well as literary and cultural history.
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“There is a tradition of irony in Austria, not only in literature”, said Kathrin Röggla in an interview in 2012; my article considers the assertion as a starting point to an analysis of three novels by contemporary Austrian women authors Flor, Präauer and Simon. The aim is to examine the different patterns of irony by Flor, Präauer and Simon in order to assess what the “Austrian” concept of irony can mean today. Furthermore, I would like to consider the „Austrian“ irony as a specific Austrian cue to express involvement in current political matters.
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The article examines Paulus Hochgatterers story Der Tag, an dem mein Großvater ein Held war (2017) as specific literary contribution to contemporary Austrian memory culture, especially concerning the remembrance of the crimes of national socialism. The text’s particular approach to the subject, which is notorious in Austria at least since the 1980s, can be seen in the topographical positioning of the events in the backup area, their temporal positioning in the “state of exception” (G. Agamben) of the last weeks of WW II and especially in the narrative construction of alternative scenarios.
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Austria can look back on a long history of literature which is marked by its inter-/transcultural character. Many of the Austrian authors are cross-border commuters, their intercultural ties give them a “bridge-breaking” function: The literary texts of authors with a migration background today form an integral part of Austrian contemporary literature and give literary and aesthetically interesting impulses to Austrian literature. Many of them want to assert themselves under new cultural conditions, in a different environment, to position themselves in the cultural circle of the new home, or perhaps even to redesign their cultural identity. In their texts one can find not only the themes of a state of cultural transplantation and relocation, but also the examination of questions of national and cultural identity. The article investigates which identity drafts the reader is confronted with in the texts by an author with a migration background who has meanwhile established themself in the German-language literary scene: The analysis focuses on selected texts by Radek Knapp, a literary “bridge builder” of the Polish-Austrian cultural area. The selected literary texts of Knapp are then analysed in order to see how (and if) the depicted figures establish or preserve their identity and how Radek Knapp approaches and deals with the “Austrian-ness”.
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In the codicil to her prize speech on the occasion of the first award ceremony (1997) for Schreiben zwischen den Kulturen Alma Hadzibeganovic, born in the bosno-croatian crossborder city of Brčko, presented a quite idiosyncratic and at the same time explanatory alphabet. The letter ‚R’ hereby emphasized a specific rebellious character of most of her same aged authors coming from migration backgrounds. Looking back on twenty years of literary and cultural production we probably may assert that selfpositionings as expressed by Hadzibeganovic in the meantime have contributed to differentiate at one hand literary techniques of authors coming from other backgrounds and to establish at the other hand connexions and intersections with the specific Austrian tradition of critical, ironical and experimental approaches in writing and reflecting words and worlds.
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From the point of view of sociological field theory multilingualism, intercultural background and strangeness are social and cultural forms of capital which could also become part of symbolic capital. In the paper four Austrian writers (Anna Kim, Milena Michiko Flašar, Doron Rabinovici and Michael Stavarič) are examined in view of the attributed/declared intercultural character of their work as well as their positions in the field. In the conclusion a question is raised whether their stigmatization as ‘strangers’ could bring benefits for their positions and whether the expected normalization of intercultural literature is desired in every respect.
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Present contribution focuses on the function of mythical and fantastic elements in connection with the role of time in the novel Brenntage of Czech-Austrian author Michael Stavarič. Beyond a special way of waste disposal, the title of the book refers to an iterative symbolic act in a village community which determines the relation to their past. This article examines Brenntage with regard to the linguistic presentation of parallel narrative worlds, which constitutes the polyphony of the text. Special attention will be given to the combination of cyclic and linear concepts of time that create the multi-layering of the text and which are going to be interpreted in the context of the transition to adulthood. Subsequently, variant readings will be presented to show possible consequences of the juxtaposition of cyclicity and linearity for the position of the first-person narrator.
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The following article is dedicated to the Austrian youth novel Papierklavier (2020) by Elisabeth Steinkellner. On the level of histoire, further thematic constellations of conflict intertwine with the specific form, which incorporate current feminist discourses to reflect body norms and images. The following analysis draws on recent approaches to age (Benner & Ullmann 2019), queerness (Kraß 2003) and intersectionality (Benner 2016; Walgenbach 2012) to analyse this tense interplay of form and content.
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Using insights from the field of material ecocriticism, this article examines how human subjects in Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara and Karen Duve’s Regenroman, relate to their dynamic material environment. The literary imagination allows us to acknowledge the interconnectedness of humans, waste and nature by revealing the human subject as part of networks of distributed agents. Traditionally, man’s supposed superiority was achieved through dualisms: cultural activities were assigned to the realm of the active, while the material environment was considered to be passive. In both novels, intermediate characters are introduced who escape these dualisms and, by doing so, illustrate the interconnectedness with their environment. Furthermore, dualistic thinking is also destabilized by drawing attention to the materiality of the human body itself.
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