Tuschling, Jeanine Katharina (2010) "Ruhe, jetzt spreche ich" : zur Reflexion engagierter Autorschaft in Elfriede Jelineks Todsündenzyklus. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Elfriede Jelinek is one of the few German-speaking contemporary authors who
have attracted intense attention of both critics and scholars while being alive.
After the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 even more analyses on her works
have been published. In spite of her apparent presence in the public realm,
critics tend to read her works as "authorless" texts, in which the narrative voices
merge and make it impossible to discern either personal or authorial voices. The
author's concern with post-modern and poststructuralist theories such as Roland
Barthes' have reinforced the tendency to marginalize the topic of authorship in
Jelinek scholarship.
This thesis aims to analyse authorial voices and motives in Jelinek's prose
texts Lust, Gier and Neid and to contextualize them with the images of the
author that were produced outside the texts, namely in the media and in literary
criticism. I would thereby like to demonstrate that these figurations form an
important connection between text and context and help provide an insight into
central motifs of Jelinek's works. The abovementioned novels are suitable for
such an analysis, as they help establish a line of development of the authorship
motif throughout the three decades of Jelinek's literary production.
Furthermore, this analysis closes an existing gap in research on Jelinek as there
exists no study that compares the three novels. The novel Gier has so far mostly
been ignored by research and there are very few studies on the online project
Neid. Dealing with prose texts instead of plays has the advantage of being able to highlight the function of the narrative comment that has developed into an
authorial voice over time.
The purpose of this study is neither the revision of the existence of the
criticism of the notions of the author or the subject within the texts nor shall it
be to establish a biographical link between aesthetics and author. The idea is to
show that Jelinek considers the relationship between life and literature, between
author and public as essential mechanisms of power. These cannot just be
annihilated through criticising them, or by declaring the author as irrelevant.
Jelinek's reflections on authorship are based on a cultural critique that deals
with the conceptualisation of bourgeois subjectivity and thereafter with the
notion of the authorial discourse. Jelinek's authorial criticism draws on
Foucault's theoretical writings on the social and historical genesis of the notion
of authorship that he has coined in the term 'author-function'. Questioning the
instance of the speaker, Jelinek simultaneously reflects on the conditions and
strategies of authorization of who is speaking.
Jelinek's literary self-reflections speak of an authorial self-understanding that
could be seen as a derivative form of engaged writing stemming from a reading
of Adorno's Negative Dialectics. Drawing on Adorno, Jelinek develops a
negative aesthetics that influences her authorial concept. She does not aim to
develop an aesthetics suggesting a positive form of seemingly free engaged
writing, but a mise-en-scène of the paradoxical constitution of authorship in
modern capitalism.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PT Germanic literature
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Jelinek, Elfriede, 1946- -- Criticism and interpretation, Discourse analysis, Narrative, Authorship
Official Date:	September 2010
Dates:	Date Event September 2010 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of German Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Schmitz, Helmut ; Carter, Erica
Sponsors:	University of Warwick ; Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland ; Women in German Studies (Organization)
Extent:	viii, 323 leaves
Language:	ger

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