Elfriede Jelinek’s body of work—awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2004, to great controversy—has been alternately characterized as moral satire, Marxist-feminist fable, a Barthesian weaponization of myth against itself, and “whining, unenjoyable public pornography.” More suggestively, her prose and performance texts may be read as instantiating the terms of Fredric Jameson’s projected “new realism”: the reconstitution of a social totality in which relations of exploitation and domination are revealed for what they are—moments of class struggle. Yet Jelinek is infamous for her resolute negativity and cold analysis of, if not sneering contempt for, the conditions that shape the social world and the constraints that determine our experiences within it. As rich in commonplaces and cliché as they are with intertextual references, her writing treats received language like a slurry from which, by way of excessive wordplay and neologism, patterns of oppression can be recognized and denaturalized. From her anti-romance novel Women as Lovers to her take on the petit-bourgeois family saga Wonderful, Wonderful Times to her sardonic approach to the crime novel in Greed, how can we read Jelinek’s negativity as productive of an aesthetic appropriate to life after liberal humanism?
In this course, we’ll read broadly across Jelinek’s body of work—including the above novels in their entirety—in order to ask: What kind of “realism” emerges from explicitly anti-realist technique? How do capitalism and the legacy of fascism shape sex and romance, sexuality and the family? What role does myth, ancient and modern, play in Jelinek’s vision of the world? And how do we go about reading novels that withhold from us the contours of inner experience? Supplementary readings may be drawn from, among others, Elizabeth Grosz, Slavoj Žižek, Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Kate Zambreno, Dagmar Herzog, Andrea Dworkin, and Kathy Acker.
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