Journal of Austrian Studies 50:3-4

Journal of Austrian Studies 50:3-4

Edited by Todd Herzog and Hillary Hope Herzog

Table Of Contents

Articles
Die sich auf- und entrollende Zeit: Temporal Metaphors and the Emergence of Myth in Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis
Rebecca Panter
Christoph Ransmayr's novel Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis uses adornments of the bourgeois interior—carpet and wallpaper—to represent distorted human relationships to time. The arbitrary and problematic layerings of time illustrated by these metaphors are characteristic of myth; just as these surfaces are used as overlays in domestic architecture, myth functions as a conceptual overlay in mental architecture. The deployment of these images in Ransmayr's novel presents a model for the generation and perpetuation of myths in postmodern society. The consequences of acting in ways that are out of sync with the actually existing temporal sequence manifest themselves in the novel as human hardships and as the reproduction of myths about polar exploration that are emblematic of larger patterns in Western thought.

Noise and Arnold Schoenberg's 1913 Scandal Concert
Joy H. Calico
On March 31, 1913, Arnold Schoenberg conducted a concert in the Great Hall of Vienna's Musikverein that would become known as that city's most notorious musical scandal. The event was broken up by physical violence, charges were filed, and the subsequent court proceedings were reported in the press. The composer then gave an interview in which he accused the audience of committing two crimes: making illegal noise in a concert hall and destroying property. This article analyzes the ways in which both the scandal and Schoenberg's response to it sit at the nexus of fin-de-siècle anxieties about Central European concert life, the anti-noise movement, and emerging copyright law.

The Avant-Garde Sprachkritik of Paul Hatvani: Mysticism, Eroticism, and Heterodox Religious Experience
Sami Sjöberg
The works of the Austrian-Jewish author and theorist Paul Hatvani (1892–1975) have often been overlooked, but his Nachlaß suggests that he was a significant figure in the Wiener Moderne literary circles. Having been influenced by the quietist-linguistic philosophy and language crisis of the period, his version of Sprachkritik was unique in its indebtedness to Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah. Hatvani's Sprachkritik distinguishes scientific and philosophical knowledge from poetical and mystical experientiality, and his poetics establishes a modern variant of mysticism. Owing to the link with the Jewish tradition, the gender dimorphism of kabbalistic theosophy becomes omnipresent in his theoretical thinking about language and evokes symbolic eroticism. Such eroticism echoes the heterodox religious experiences of mysticism, such as inexpressible ecstasy, which Hatvani posits at the heart of his language criticism and poetics.

Böse Kräfte im brasilianischen Paradies: Gift, Leben und Tod bei dem Besuch Stefan Zweigs am Schlangeninstitut von Butantan
Jereon Dewulf
It is well known that Stefan Zweig had a passion for Brazil, in particular for Rio de Janeiro. He was much more reserved, however, about Brazil's largest city, São Paulo. Yet his visit to the Butantan snake institute in São Paulo was not inconsequential. This article shows that the lukewarm Brazilian reception of Zweig's book Brasilien: Ein Land der Zukunft (1941) may in part be attributed to his failure to write more enthusiastically about Butantan and to show a better understanding of the importance of the scientific achievements by the institute's founder, Vital Brazil, to the nation's self-consciousness. Zweig's interest in a flask with a high concentration of snake venom resonates with the many mentions of poison in his work and anticipates his future death by suicide. The article also suggests a different interpretation of Zweig's suicide as a (potential) form of regeneration rather than resignation.

Das Marterkapital meiner Herkunft: Economic Narrative in Thomas Bernhard's Korrektur
Eyal Amiran
Thomas Bernhard hated Austria, but his larger subject was the economic logic of modernity. In his novels Frost, The Loser, Extinction, and especially Korrektur, writing, madness, and the state are produced by a modern relationship with objects that requires infinite expenditure. Drawing on Marx, Simmel, Freud, and Sartre, this article contests readings of Bernhard as romantic provocateur, showing instead that for Bernhard, narrative consciousness is economic. The failure of the state and the failure of narrative reflect the economic world that produces both. Austria is not to blame for its complicity with modernity, but only because it is the symptom of irredeemable culture.

Reviews
Scott Spector, Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914
Cynthia A. Klima

Johann Georg Lughofer und Stéphane Pesnel, Hrsg., Literarischer Pazifismus und pazifistische Literatur. Bertha von Suttner zum 100. Todestag
Cindy Walter-Gensler

Katherine Sorrels, Cosmopolitan Outsiders: Imperial Inclusion, National Exclusion, and the Pan-European Idea, 1900–1930
Laura A. Detre

Arthur Cools and Vivian Liska, eds., Kafka and the Universal
Ruth V. Gross

Sandy Scheffler, Operation Literatur: Zur Interdependenz von literarischem Diskurs und Schmerzdiskurs im "Prager Kreis" im Kontext der Moderne
Pamela S. Saur

Ulrike Robeck, Egon Erwin Kischs "Marktplatz der Sensationen". Ein semiautobiografisches Debüt im Exil
Martin A. Hainz

Birgit Nübel und Norbert Christian Wolf, Hrsg., Robert Musil Handbuch
Birthe Hoffmann

Paula Wojcik und Elisabeth Johanna Koehn, Hrsg., Schwellenräume–Schwellenzeiten in den Werken von Irène Némirovsky, Leo Perutz und Bruno Schultz
Roswitha Rust Cesaratto

Karin Röhricht, Wettlesen um den Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis: Korpusanalyse der Anthologie Klagenfurter Texte (1977–2011)
Paul Buchholz

Teresa Kovacs, Drama als Störung: Elfriede Jelineks Konzept des Sekundärdramas
Britta Kallin

Gabriella Rovagnati, Studien zur österreichischen Literatur: Von Nestroy bis Ransmayr
Cynthia A. Klima

Klaus Amann und Wolfgang Hackl, Hrsg., Satire–Ironie–Parodie. Aspekte des Komischen in der deutschen Sprache und Literatur
Elmar Lenhart

Thomas Wegmann und Martina King, Hrsg., Fallgeschichte(n) als Narrativ zwischen Literatur und Wissen
Martin A. Hainz

Herbert Zeman, ed., Bio-Bibliographisches Lexikon der Literatur Österreichs
Vincent Kling

Erich Hackl, Three Tearless Histories
Francis Michael Sharp

David Wyn Jones, Music in Vienna, 1700, 1800, 1900
Peter Höyng

Arthur Schnitzler, Die Frau des Weisen: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe
Raymond L. Burt

Ulrich E. Bach, Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire
Gundolf Graml

Walter Rauscher and Arnold Suppan, eds., Außenpolitische Dokumente der Republik Österreich 1918–1939
Laura A. Detre

Edith Silbermann, Czernowitz—Stadt der Dichter: Geschichte einer jüdischen Familie aus der Bukowina (1900–1948)
Joseph W. Moser

Dagmar Heissler, Ernst Lothar: Schriftsteller, Kritiker, Theaterschaffender
Joseph McVeigh

Harold Höbusch, "Mountain of Destiny": Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination
Samuel J. Kessler

Klaus Amann, Fabjan Hafner, and Doris Moser, eds., Drehe die Herzspindel weiter für mich: Christine Lavant zum 100.
Lorely French

Stefan Winterstein, Doderer-Lektüren: Die Romane nach 1945, neu gelesen
Vincent Kling

Dominik Hofmann-Wellenhof, Autobiographische Darstellungen von Identitätskrisen im Exil: Frederic Mortons und Ruth Klügers Suche nach Brücken in einer neuen Heimat
Margarete Landwehr

Katherine Arens, Vienna's Dreams of Europe
Traci S. O'Brien

Günter Bischof and Ferdinand Karlhofer, eds., Austrian Studies Today
Britta McEwen

Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, Theaterdramaturgien von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart
Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

Ilse Aichinger, The Greater Hope
Kirsten A. Krick-Aigner

Gerd K. Schneider, Things Could've Been a Lot Worse: The Experiences of a German American Bellybutton Jew of Berlin Origins
Dagmar C. G. Lorenz