Ordnung — Raum — Ritual. Adalbert Stifters artifizieller Realismus by Sabine Becker, Katharina Grätz

Abstract

2 8 AUSTRIAN STUDIES l6 (20 8) productions and robbed the plays of their ambiguity and vitality. In recent decades that situation has improved, with inner conflicts and confusions within the characters being highlighted in productions such as Thomas Langhoff s J?din (Salzburg, 1990/1, with Ulrich M?he as Alphons) or Martin Kusej's K?nig Ottokar (Salzburg, 2005, and subsequently at the Burgtheater). No doubt wisely, Deutsch-Schreiner chooses to ignore some of themore ludicrous manifestations of Regietheater in recent years. On a related note, Clifford Bernd uses Ottok?r to emphasize Grillparzer's sense of pageant and theatricality, even ifhis plays lack the dramatic clash of powerful characters. In other contributions Wolfgang M?ller-Funk contrasts LibussawiXh Brentano's Die Gr?ndung Prags as examples of 'the narrative matrix of gynaecocracy' (p. 72). William Reeve provides a Freudian analysis of sexual symbolism in Rustan's humiliating 'failure as aman' as his dream punishes him forhis 'repressed desire to kill his father' (pp. 129, 131). Katherine Arens seeks to present Das Kloster von Sendomir as a complex tale of political and historical allusions and literary intertextuality that allows a fourfold narratological approach: Grillparzer, she concludes, is 'realistic without being realist, historical without being historicist, didactic without being overly sectarian, [...] elite [but not] elitist' (p. 46). The present reviewer, however, who is chided for having described the story as a 'rather lightweight work' (p. 42), is not entirely convinced by Arens's sophis ticated pyrotechnics. Overall the volume contains some useful reworkings of earlier approaches and the occasional interesting insight,without offering any convincingly innovative analyses. There are some typographical errors, such as the misspellings of 'international' (p. x), 'Moriz (notMoritz) Enzinger' (p. 10), 'synonym' (p. 61), 'Medea' (p. 64), 'thought out' (p. 83), or the misuse of 'about to' (p. 17) or 'savings' (p. 108); the formatting of the bibliographies, especially the line spacing, reveals many inconsistencies. University of Reading Ian F. Roe Ordnung ? Raum ? Ritual. Adalbert Stiftersartifizieller Realismus. Ed. by Sabine Becker and Katharina Gr?tz. Heidelberg: Universit?tsverlag Winter. 2007. 339 pp. 45,00. isbn 978-3-8253-5129-8. This collection of thirteen essays plus a substantial introduction by the editors deals with a number of related themes that have been the subject of much recent critical interest in Stifter. These themes include several aspects of his use of ritual (a topic on which twomonographs appeared in 2005), nature, cultural transmission, the uses of the past in the present and the construction of identity on the cusp of modernity. Alongside this involvement in current debates about Stifter, often by major Stifter scholars with monographs to their names (Blasberg, Gr?tz, Schifferm?ller, Schmidt), the volume often also has an introductory feel to it.There is a good variety ofmaterial, but likewise, a sense of composition, since there is a kind of relay or Reigen, according to which a theme or topic or text featured in one essay will also feature in the next, which is followed by another, picking up a different aspect of the second, and so forth. AUSTRIAN STUDIES l6 (20 8) 209 The first two essays are explicitly about Stifter's relationship with the past. Markus Fauser looks at the symbolic coding involved in cultural transmission, with special reference to Das alte Siegel, Die Mappe and B?gitta. He makes interesting connections between Stifter and Karl Immermann (on whom Fauser has published a major monograph), and Ernst Cassirer's view of symbols as forms of life, material with traces of vanished life restored to them. Silke Arnold De Simine puts Stifter in the ? eminently relevant and illuminating ? context of recent museum theory (in the aftermath of 1848 he became responsible for the conservation ofmonuments inUpper Austria). She traces a development in Stifter's attitude to the stewardship of cultural memory between the time of the essay 'Der Tandelmarkt' inWien und dieWiener and that of Der Nachsommer. Hee-Ju Kim's essay is the first of several in the volume to look in detail at an individual work, in this case Der Hochwald. Kim argues that the dualism of nature and culture that Christian Begemann, for instance, discerns in the story needs...