About the Book
In his prose fiction, memoirs, poetry, and drama, Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989)--one of the 20th century's most uniquely gifted writers--created a new and radical style, seemingly out of thin air. His books never “tell a story” in the received sense. Instead, he rages on the page, he rants and spews vitriol about the moral failures of his homeland, Austria, in the long amnesiac aftermath of the Second World War.
Yet this furious prose, seemingly shapeless but composed with unparalleled musicality, and taxing by conventional standards, has been powerfully echoed in many writers since Bernhard's death in 1989. These explorers have found in Bernhard's singular accomplishment new paths for the expression of life and truth.
Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives examines the international mobilization of Bernhard's style. Writers in Italian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, English, and French have succeeded in making Bernhard's Austrian vision an international vision. This book tells that story.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Master of Understatement, or Remembering Schermaier
Stephen Dowden (Brandeis University, USA)
1. The Afterlife of Thomas Bernhard in Contemporary Austrian Literature
Katya Krylova (University of Aberdeen, UK)
2. How Not to Begin: Wrestling with Thomas Bernhard
Kata Gellen (Duke University, USA)
3. Bernhard, Sebald, and Photography in Holocaust Memory
Agnes Mueller (University of South Carolina, USA)
4. Radical Style: Bernhard, Sontag, Kertész
Stephen Dowden (Brandeis University, USA)
5. The Stains of Cultural Inheritance: Thomas Bernhard and Philip Roth
Byron Spring (Lincoln College, University of Oxford, UK)
6. Gaddis before Bernhard before Gaddis
Martin Klebes (University of Oregon, USA)
7. Thomas Bernhard, a Writer for Spain
Heike Scharm (University of South Florida, USA)
8. Immersions into Bernhard's Works in Recent Francophone Literature
Olaf Berwald (Kennesaw State University, USA)
9. Thomas Bernhard's Influence on Gabriel Josipovici's Monologue Novels
Gregor Thuswaldner (Whitworth University, USA)
10. Thomas Bernhard, Italo Calvino, Elena Ferrante, and Claudio Magris: From Postmodernism to Anti-Semitism
Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski (Duke University, USA)
11. Thomas Bernhard's Extinction: Variations/Variazioni/Variaciones
Juliane Werner (University of Vienna, Austria)
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Olaf Berwald is Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Professor of German at Kennesaw State University, USA. His most recent book is A Companion to the Works of Max Frisch (2013).
Steve Dowden is Professor of German Literature at Brandeis University, USA. He is the author of three previous books, including Kafka's Castle and the Critical Imagination (1995), and the editor or co-editor of four books, including Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought (2014; co-edited with Thomas P. Quinn).
Gregor Thuswaldner is Provost and Executive Vice President at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, USA. His most recent book is The Hermeneutics of Hell: Visions and Representations of the Devil in World Literature (2017).
Review :
A masterful set of essays on Bernhard's oeuvre .... Taken together, the eleven chapters of this book represent some of the best scholarship in English to date on Bernhard's remarkable impact on the world of postwar. ... There is too little space in a review like this to do justice to the breadth and quality of each of the other contributions. They represent literary scholars from across the major Western languages and have given us an essay collection that's truly useful: a sophisticated introduction to Bernhard's echo in Euro-American prose.
More than three decades after his death, Thomas Bernhard has become an author of world literature. The resonance of Bernhard's voice in the works of numerous contemporaries far beyond the borders of Austria provides powerful testimony of this fact. In its exploration of this resonance, this remarkable volume makes a significant contribution to Bernhard criticism. Through their forays into Bernhard's international reception, the essays collected here open up new and extended vistas into the œuvre of one of the foremost German-language writers of the 20th century.
In this insightful volume, we learn about the many ways in which authors across the globe have sought to emulate the great Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), from 'anticipatory plagiarism' to 'coinhabiting palimpsests.' Writers like Susan Sontag, W.G. Sebald, Geoff Dyer, Imre Kertész, Italo Calvino, and Horacio Castellanos Moya have turned to the brilliantly querulous Austrian to pursue their own political or aesthetic projects. Their takings have been devious, inclusive, maddening, profound, liberating. There are numerous avenues still to pursue with Bernhard, and this volume explores one fruitful possibility.
This series of innovative reflections on and thoughtful engagements with Bernhard are an excellent addition to the field, especially to those studies of the author's work that explore its effects in a range of cultural and linguistic contexts.
