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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | ELFRIEDE JELINEK: Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity: A Critical Anthology
ISBN# 9780838641545
Reviewed by: Britta Kallin (Georgia Institute of Technology)
German Studies Review |
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Despite international recognition of her work, not many books in English have dealt with Elfriede Jelinek's oeuvre. Fifteen years ago, Jorun Johns and Katherine Arens edited the anthology Framed by Language, which includes the author's earlier works. Allyson Fiddler's seminal study, Rewriting Reality: An Introduction to Elfriede-Jelinek (1994), was another ground-breaking study in English that thoroughly examined her plays and novels up until the mid-1990s.
Ever since Jelinek received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, critics have commented that not enough of her literary work has been translated into English, nor have there been any critical anthologies that deal with her work or the reception of her work. Matthias Konzett and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger intended to fill this void and collected contributions from scholars in the U.S., many of whom have previously published on Jelinek.
The anthology is divided into four parts and a preface in which Konzett places Jelinek's themes and techniques into historical context. Lamb-Faffelberger's introduction (part one) situates the author and her work within the Austrian and German-language literary corpus. The plays and novels that are covered in this anthology are not in chronological order, rather they are thematically arranged in: part two, "Voices of Dissent"; part three, "Conflicts of Nationhood and Citizenship"; and part four, "Negative Aesthetics, the Body, and Commodity." This groups the contributions of the 12 authors into distinct, yet related topics. Not all of Jelinek's works are covered, and even though Konzett mentions in the preface that Totenauberg best illustrates the wealth of Jelinek's idioms, some plays, for example Totenauberg and Sportstuck, are left out.
The four parts start off with Dagmar Lorenz's very convincing reading of the book and film Die Ausgesperrten and her analysis of a critique of ideology in the texts. Rebecca Thomas examines the rise of pop culture in Jelinek's early works Michael. Ein Jugendbuch and wir sind lockvogel, baby. Kathleen Kolmar investigates Die Liebhaberinnen and Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stutzen der Gesellschaft. Edna Eppelbaum scrutinizes the functions of the stage and Jelinek's postmodern appropriation of drama in Burgtheater. Michaela Grobbel reads the characters of the slain Roma in the play Stecken, Stab und Stangl as ghosts and undead both in the text and performances of the play.
Barbara Kosta analyzes how Jorg Haider's and the FPO's role in Austrian politics are mirrored in Das Lebewohl, which incorporates Aeschylus' Oresteia and Beethoven's sonata op. 81a. The philosophical undertones and Jelinek's struggle with German philosophical traditions and its repercussions for discussions on gender appear in several of the articles. Nancy Erickson investigates how Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger's thoughts are mirrored in In den Alpen, a play commenting on the creation of Austrian identity as a tourist destination, a nation that indulges in sports and athletic competitions as an identity marker. Another excellent contribution is Maria-Regina Kecht's reading of Die Kinder der Toten, a novel which she rightfully calls one of Jelinek's most important and least understood works. Memory, remembrance, gender, and the Shoah are inextricably linked in this novel as Kecht convincingly argues.
Helga Kraft then analyzes the construction of the Austrian body both as a national body and the creation of physical bodies like those of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jorg Haider, for example. Karl Ivan Solibakke's contribution highlights the musical components in Die Klavierspielerin, Jelinek's most well-known work. Willy Riemer cleverly examines the dialogue between power and desire represented in this path-breaking novel. The volume closes with Sunka Simon's chapter on Jelinek's script for the film version of Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina.
All articles convincingly examine the role of gender in the works of Jelinek and its commentary on gender roles in contemporary Western societies. Reading all these excellent contributions, one wonders why the subtitle is not Gender, Nation, and Identity, but "Writing Woman" - because all authors investigate the construction of gender and the critique of gender in Jelinek's oeuvre as a crucial point. Without concepts of gender analysis, Jelinek's highly interwoven language and its cross-references, intertextuality, and assessment of Austria's role during the Shoah and today could not be as well understood. Konzett and Lamb-Faffelberger's volume sheds new light on Jelinek's works that are analyzed with theoretical approaches within German Studies in the U.S. It also creates exciting spaces for new perspectives on her oeuvre and starts a dialogue for readers of English interested in the author's impact on Austrian and world literature.
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