Basic Lines of Handke’s Reception in Literary Criticism and Science

Abstract

From the very beginning, the reception of Handke’s work in literary criticism and literary studies has revolved around a few thematic areas, which are determined on the one hand by the public discussion of the author and on the other by specific academic questions. Especially at the beginning of Handke’s writing career, journalistic and literary criticism overlapped, if only because the author stylized himself as an ‘enfant terrible’ of the literary scene. A comparable combination of public and scholarly criticism occurs in connection with the debate about Handke’s Serbian texts (Deichmann 1999), which was revived on the occasion of the Nobel Prize award in 2019. In the process, an almost structurally identical debate is repeated, without the basic positions that have changed. In it, one can observe both an even greater divergence of journalistic and literary-critical discourse, as well as a recourse not only to the same arguments over and over again but also to comparable methods in influencing public opinion about the author.