Elfriede Jelinek and Werner Schwab : Heimat Critique and Dissections of Right-wing Populism and Xenophobia
- Submitting institution
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The University of Lancaster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 280718048
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Contemporary European Playwrights
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781138084216
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 7700-word chapter is the first in English to rigorously compare the work of Jelinek and Schwab, two of Austria’s most prominent contemporary playwrights. It considers their differences while identifying considerable affinities between their oeuvres, forms of writing and overlapping political concerns.
Thematically, the chapter considers how Jelinek and Schwab vehemently address the postwar legacy of National Socialism and renewed far-right rightwing populism in Austria, showing how these are sedimented in everyday discourse.
The body of the chapter focusses on the authors’ Heimat critique and dissections of right-wing populism and xenophobia through analysing a number of significant plays by each author and their stagings by European directors. The chapter explores how, in their form of writing, both playwrights are associated with the paradigm of postdramatic theatre. Their linguistic experiments question dramatic representation by turning a defamiliarizing form of language into the actual protagonist. This focus on language is traced to an Austrian tradition of language critique (Sprachkritik) that explores connections between language, thought and perception. The influence of corporeal discourses, Austrian folk traditions of staging the grotesque body, and Viennese actionism are explored, as well as Schwab’s practice as visual artist and Jelinek’s art criticism. The chapter argues that Schwab’s plays can shock through their unexpected disruptions of dramatic forms from within conventional forms, while Jelinek’s progressive abandonment of dramatic characters, dialogue and plot structures in favour of polyphonic ‘Textflächen’, allows her to address burning social and political issues. Multi-layered texts allow for associations between sources and European dramatic and pre-dramatic traditions. While Schwab addressed social abjection and its reinforcement by bourgeois naturalism through an artificial idiom, hypernaturalism and devices such as the play within a play, Jelinek’s texts are especially open to postdramatic forms that address representation of marginalized and excluded groups on the level of theatrical representation itself.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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