Thomas Bernhard: Seeming Volatility, Innovation in Purity (original) (raw)

Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard

The epigraph to Correction, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard's masterpiece, reads: "A body needs at least three points of support, not in a straight line, to fix its position." Three-Part Inventions finds in this simple geometrical axiom a surprisingly complex key to an understanding of Bernhard's major novels. It argues that each of them, although firmly anchored in Austrian history, emerges from an archetypal story involving a trio of figures: a protagonist who, having been deprived of a desired object by a more powerful adversary, displaces his frustration upon a scapegoat who suffers in his place. It further shows that Bernhard transforms this destructive protagonist-adversary-scapegoat pattern into a creative trio formed by the author himself, the artistic precursors who serve as his models, and the readers who receive the finished work. This study is intended to enrich for English-language readers the unforgettable experience of reading the author whom Italo Calvino once called "the greatest writer in the world.

Jean Paul’s “Siebenkäs” as an explicit and implicit intertext in Thomas Bernhard’s fiction

В статье сопоставляется поэтика Т. Бернхарда и Жан-Поля с точки зрения эксплицитных и имплицитных интертекстуальных связей. На материале произведений «Изничтожение: Распад» и «Зибенкэз» анализируется модель жизни как письма. The paper offers a comparative study of Th. Bernhard‟s and Jean Paul‟s poetics focused on both explicit and implicit intertextual links. The authors‟ “Auslöschung: Ein Zerfall” and “Siebenkäs” are analysed in view of life performed as if it is a writing. Ключевые слова: модернизм, Томас Бернхард, Жан-Поль, интертекстуальность. Keywords: modernism, Thomas Bernhard, Jean Paul, intertextuality.

A Scrupulous Fidelity: Thomas Bernhard's The Loser

Attack of the Copula Spiders, BIblioasis, 2012

Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland where his Austrian mother had fled to escape the shame of her unwanted pregnancy. He never knew his father who died far away and in obscurity (and obscure circumstances). His mother mistreated him because of the shame he represented. Back in Austria he wanted to be an opera singer and studied music but caught a cold working at a menial job to make ends meet; the cold turned into tuberculosis. He was hospitalized repeatedly, his treatment was bungled, he was given up for dead, and survived just to prove how stupid his doctors were. Since opera-singing was out, he became a writer. He became a famous writer of deadpan, mordant, hilarious, difficult (modernist) novels and plays that often portray depressed characters with lung diseases.

Symmetry Unbound: Thomas Bernhard and Borderless Writing

My paper will consider two questions about Thomas Bernhard's autobiographical writings and, by implication, his work as a whole. First, how do we account for the aesthetic pleasure of a body of work that has reached well beyond the borders of Austria and produced so powerful an effect on so many readers who know so little about Austria?

Musical dreams: Examining musical elements in Thomas Bernhard’s “Reunion” and "Goethe Dies”

2019

This thesis provides a reading of Thomas Bernhard's prose understood as prosaic music. Comparing Ludwig Wittgenstein's struggle to write philosophy with Bernhard's use of literary-musical elements, I shed light on how Bernhard's disturbing stories, inhabited by unlikable characters and composed in a fragmented, alienating, figurative style, create not only a joyful, but meaningful experience, because Bernhard's linguistic music-making illuminates the background of destructive and annihilated lives. Studies of Bernhard's work that only focus on direct structural similarities between music and literature, or only on the historical or biographical narrative, neglect the intrinsic importance of the aesthetic of his musical prose and its comic, mocking musical form. People, places and memories are foregrounded as musical leitmotifs. Exaggerations, repetitions and comic authorship result in skilfully designed, intimate musical dreaming. Bernhard's stories "Reunion" and "Goethe Dies" are examined with reference to other stories in Chapters entitled "Welcome to

The Unconscionable Critic: Thomas Bernhard's Holzfällen

"Through a reading of Holzfällen, this essay seeks to address a persistent problem in the work of Thomas Bernhard: the curious divergence of critique and rational argument. The novel presents a series of scornful attacks on a variety of people, places, objects, and activities, but consistently withholds reasoned explanations, thus precluding any possible agreement with or acceptance of the views expressed in it. Scholars have proved unable to reconcile the unfairness, exaggeration, and disparateness of the narrator’s claims with the novel’s critical framework. By examining the discourse of affect in Holzfällen, the authors argue that it presents a form of critique whose central principle is the maintenance of social distance. The narrator wants neither to persuade nor to reform others, but rather to describe and enact a process of disentanglement and departure."