Travelling Gestures.

This book is dedicated to the plays of Austrian Nobel Prize winner for literature Elfriede Jelinek and their references to ancient Greek tragedy. In recent years, Jelinek`s work has generated lively interest both within German literature studies and in international theatre studies. It is all the more astonishing that the references to tragedy, which have characterized Jelinek`s plays since Ein Sportstück (Sports Play, 1999), have not yet been systematically analyzed. Travelling Gestures intends to close this research gap. Starting point is the premise that Jelinek`s recourse to Greek-ancient tragedy is based on a mode of interruption inspired by montage and quotation and can thus be understood with Walter Benjamin as a gestural procedure. In quoting, i.e., in interrupting tragedy, Jelinek clearly rejects a teleological thinking of history and dramatic action and at the same time disturbs binary conceptions such as then/now and animate/inanimate. In rewriting tragedy, she crosses the male gaze of the old poets and que(e)rs categorizations and attributions regarding gender, class, and ethnicity. Based on this observation, the book asks what gestures Jelinek`s traversals of tragedy produce in touching virulent themes and how such gestures materialize in specific performances of her texts. How do text and performance deal with elements of tragedy such as prologue, epilogue, messenger report and choral passages? Which democratic-political, natio-ethno-cultural and gender- specific discourses are thereby taken up? What times and spaces appear through the recourse to affective gestures such as those of lament, vituperation, or revenge in a single image? Which itineraries can be traced between ancient pre-text, continuation, and performance and which intermedial processes are related to this? This first-ever systematic investigation of Jelinek`s references to tragedy touches on central socio-political discourses of our time, places them in a historical as well as global context and can thus be understood as a groundbreaking work on one of the most important authors of our time.

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