Dramaturgies of the (Dis-)Continuative

Elfriede Jelinek, Austrias sole recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of the most important representatives of a form of theatre which, following from Andrzej Wirth, Hans-Thies Lehmann attempted to subsume under the term postdramatic in 1999. Her theatre texts have been translated into 35 languages and are performed around the world. Since Ein Sportstück (1998), almost all of these texts have involved an intertextual recourse to Attic tragedy. A systematic analysis of these references has yet to be carried out and presents an urgent gap in the current research which is to be addressed by means of a transdisciplinary approach here. Unlike the existing research, which tends to view Jelineks rewriting of classical works as a deconstruction of myths, this project focusses on tragedy as a theatrical form of discourse invoked in Jelineks work. The key issue under scrutiny is how the postdramatic texts subvert concepts of unity by revisiting and drawing upon Greek Tragedy. The underlying hypothesis here is that Jelineks dramaturgies of the (dis-)continuative pursue a materialistic historiography as put forward by Walter Benjamin. Not only is the present affected by the past according to this view, but the past is also affected by the present. The question to be addressed is which virulent discourses relating to democracy, asylum law and gender are touched upon by revisiting the ancient pre-texts. To this end, and with the objective of knowledge transfer in mind, the project will draw upon the latest findings from research on tragedy including existing studies from the fields of theatre history, classical philology, the history of law and gender / queer studies in order to analyse the literary and non-literary discourses to be substantiated in Jelineks recourse to the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Based on an multiperspectival approach that combines methods from literary studies and theatre historiography while also incorporating theories from the philosophy of history, an innovative set of tools is to be developed for the analysis of theatre texts that cannot (or can no longer) be addressed using the models of classic drama analysis. This first-ever systematic study of the references to tragedy in Jelineks work involves an archaeology of aesthetico-political practices against the background of a (dis-)continuative Europe. The project consequently not only promises to take international Jelinek research to a new level; it is also a fundamental study of general socio-political relevance.

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