Die Blendung Research Articles

Representation of Concept MYTH in Austrian Literature (Works of Elias Canetti and Barbara Frischmuth)

This article explores the works of Austrian writers Elias Canetti (1905—1994) including the novel “Auto-da-Fé” (“Die Blendung”, 1935) and the autobiographical book “The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood” (“Die gerettete Zunge. Geschichte einer Jugend”, 1977), as well as Barbara Frischmuth (born 1941) with works such as “Queen of the Animals” (“Herrin der Tiere”, 1986), “Beyond Measure” (“Über die Verhältnisse”, 1987), and “Children to Each Other” (“Einander Kind”, 1990) within the context of 20th-century Austrian literature. The article identifies and analyzes mythological images present in these works, focusing on the concept of ‘personal myth’ (interpreted by Elias Canetti as ‘Privatmythos’). Through a genre-based analysis, the article delves into the artistic realization of the authors’ personal myths and the motives behind myth-making. It is established that the personal myth encompasses aspects of both the “mythical” and the “mythological”. The authors suggest a distinction between these terms, which have ambiguous interpretations. It is argued that Canetti viewed the ‘personal myth’ as an individual’s unique dream or fixation, representing their aspirations. Canetti’s autobiography allows for a synthesis of existing and constructed facts. In her “Demeter Trilogy”, Barbara Frischmuth constructs a comprehensive worldview where archaic mythology interacts with modernity, offering insights into contemporary cultural realities.

Iconic Character of Bestiary Images in the Novels of F. Werfel and E. Canetti

The anthropomorphic depiction of animals bearing allegorical meanings is the well-represented and actively demanded bestiary of world literature. It reflects the mythological thinking of writers and is an integral part of the worldview basis on which literary works are based. Bestiary images in the artistic text acquire the status of universal representative symbols. This study discusses bestiary images in novelistic works of Austrian writers, Franz Werfel (1890-1945) and Elias Canetti (1905-1994). Using the semiotic approach, the researchers define a range of images and meanings that are related to these two writers as representatives of the era of historical upheavals and individual authorial purposes that reflect the basis of the worldview of each of them. A bestiary image in a literary text can function as an iconic sign, which, on the one hand, reflects the material object in its materiality, and on the other hand, contributes to the emerging of "new", constructed by analogy, aesthetic reality. The similarity to the referent, in this case, is included in the overall system of ontological values. An iconic sign, after Ch.S. Pierce, refers to a simple sign based on the similarity to a thing and participating in the creation of symptoms of a higher order – symbols. Bestiary images in a literary text acquire the status of universal representative characters. The functioning of animal images in the text, their nomination, combinatorics, communication with the elements, time periods, and behavioural patterns are the way of the study of the philosophical foundations of the author's world picture. Canetti’s bestiary is represented by metaphorical images of a monkey, a cat, a pig, and a tortoise, which are used as a tool for analysing various psychic and psychological states of the characters of the novel "Blinding" (Die Blendung, 1931-1932). Multiple forms of anthropopathy and zoomorphism are based on the writer's attitude towards the initial "equality" of man and animal. The study of zoopoetics (the term of J. Lacan) of Werfel’s novel "Barbara, or Piety" (Barbara oder die Frömigkeit, 1929) helps to reveal the axiological foundation upon which the writer constructs his novels. The functioning of images of animals, a horse, for example, is related to the semantics of sacrifice that is rethought and acquiring new meanings in a new historical context. Composite images connecting different characteristics and associated with various natural elements are important. It is apparent that the study of the works by Werfel and Canetti, given the iconic nature of bestiary images, seems relevant to detect common patterns of development of European literature and culture of the first third of the 20th Century.

ФОРМЫ ФУНКЦИОНИРОВАНИЯ БЕСТИАРНЫХ ОБРАЗОВ В РОМАНАХ Ф. ВЕРФЕЛЯ «БАРБАРА, ИЛИ БЛАГОЧЕСТИЕ» И Э. КАНЕТТИ «ОСЛЕПЛЕНИЕ»

The article deals with bestiary images in the novels by the Austrian writers Franz Werfel (1890-1945) and Elias Canetti (1905-1994). The allegorical figures of animals, endowed with anthropomorphic characteristics, constitute a wide bestiary of world literature. In the aesthetics of the novels “The Pure in Heart” (“Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit”, 1929) by Franz Werfel and “Auto-Da-Fé” (“Die Blendung”, 1931-1932) by Elias Canetti they are closely connected with the religious search of the authors, who turned not only to Christianity, but also to the Eastern religious and philosophical tradition in the early 1930s. The mechanisms of “translating” the realistic image of an animal into the subjective-psychological and symbolic-allegorical plane are studied.

HOBBES E CANETTI: IL RISO COME MASCHERA DELL’ARCAICO

Laughter plays an important role in the works of Elias Canetti, as it can be seen in the tragic ending of Auto da fe ( Die Blendung ), or in the remarks of The Saved language on crying and laughter in the ancient theater. In Mass and Power , we find a famous passage from the Leviathan (the laughter as a feeling of superiority towards others), which shows the constant interest in the “philosophical realism” of Thomas Hobbes. Although, according to Canetti, the philosopher would not have grasped the “animal” origin of laughter. The analysis of these critical reflections, towards Hobbes, will help us to better understand the meaning attributed by Canetti to laughter as “(acoustic) mask of the archaic”

Elias Canetti—Rudolf Hartung: Briefe, Autobiographisches und Fotos. Aus dem Nachlass von Elias Canetti ed. by Bernhard Albers (review)

Reviewed by: Elias Canetti—Rudolf Hartung: Briefe, Autobiographisches und Fotos. Aus dem Nachlass von Elias Canetti ed. by Bernhard Albers William Collins Donahue Bernhard Albers, ed., Elias Canetti—Rudolf Hartung: Briefe, Autobiographisches und Fotos. Aus dem Nachlass von Elias Canetti. Aachen: Briefe, 2011. 80 pp. This slim volume is a luxury for specialists—perhaps even a questionable indulgence. It is the counterpart to Albers’s 1992 book with the symmetrical title (Rudolf Hartung–Elias Canetti. Ein Rezipient und sein Autor). Now almost [End Page 154] twenty years after the publication of that fascinating book, Albers publishes here the additional material he certainly wanted to include in the original volume. This little book should really be integrated into the first and reissued as a new whole, because it makes much more sense if the reader understands that Hartung was Canetti’s decisive promoter and critic in Germany. Actually, he was much more. Hartung was the lector at the Willi Weismann Verlag that published the first postwar German edition of Die Blendung (not a very successful venture, given the paper shortages and currency reform at the time). Crossing lines that today seem questionable, Hartung went on to write the first substantive (and insightful) review of Die Blendung. Isn’t this tantamount to the publisher writing his own blurb? Canetti responded with a thank-you letter (complimenting Hartung but clearly indicating that many more treasures lay undiscovered in the novel). This in turn began a lifelong relationship between “ein Rezipient und sein Autor.” But should this be? Michiko Kakutani, the leading book critic of the New York Times, is known to keep an absolute firewall between herself and the authors she reviews; she refuses to mix and mingle with authors at publishers’ parties because she feels this would compromise the objectivity and honesty of her critiques. Thus, one wonders about the probity of Hartung’s open agenda of promoting Canetti. The story told in these letters and documents turns out to be much more complex and interesting, with one exception: The epistolary exchange between Albers and Canetti is often mundane and seems to be included merely to fill out this already very thin book. Not that it isn’t amusing to witness a commanding author fully in charge of his corpus: Canetti personally approves or rejects the inclusion of letters and deletes passages he thinks are irrelevant or too personal. And he has a bit of a temper: he expects to be treated with respect and takes exception to a letter from Albers that does not even begin with a proper greeting. Further, he expresses his disdain for mass-market booksellers, reminding us (as he has elsewhere) “dass ich dem Massenkonsum des Literaturbetriebs einiges entgegensetze” (34). Canetti makes it clear that he is the boss. The most revealing parts, however, show us a Canetti fully aware of Hartung’s nuanced, evolving, and sometimes highly critical view of Canetti’s work. Already in the 1992 volume, we read of the stark difference in temperament between the two—Hartung as a sensitive, taciturn, contemplative critic and Canetti as a self-assured, apodictic, and forceful personality. But here we [End Page 155] gain a new and very personal insight: Canetti loved Hartung for who he was, and because in his uncompromising, candid criticism, Hartung taught him about his own work. Because of Hartung—especially when they disagree—Canetti comes to a clearer understanding of his own achievement. What is more: Canetti also values Hartung’s talent in transforming himself and treasures the fact that Hartung noticed (unlike many others—need I say it?—especially academic critics) that Canetti himself had evolved in content, mood, genre, and thought over time and that his magnum opus, the anthropological study Masse und Macht (1960) cannot therefore be facilely applied as a theoretical key to all works, prior and subsequent. Canetti here regrets the tyranny of Masse und Macht over his other work, noting that his dramas (particularly Komödie der Eitelkeit) are not theoretical works but creative works of fiction. The heart of the matter is a matter of the heart: Canetti had a genuine, deep, and very personal regard for Hartung, so much so that he withheld this...

Other Ivory Towers and Literary Counterfactuals

This paper focuses on the ivory tower topos in Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel, Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil, and Elias Canetti's Die Blendung. It examines ways in which surrogate ivory towers and counterfactuals occur in fiction set in the past, the present, and the future. The secularization and trivialization of the ivory tower posited in recent research are shown to be less significant than its accommodation to the political and cultural concerns of the twentieth century. By moving beyond earlier religious and didactic models, we show that the ivory tower concept has been constructively re-formulated to relate to modern dilemmas.

On the Contemporary Relevance of Elias Canetti’s Theory of Power

This article discusses Canetti’s theory of power in the context of what Derrida has recently described as political autoimmunity. Its first part differentiates Canetti’s approach from the postmodernism of Bernhard. A detailed textual analysis of Die Blendung is the subject of the middle part of this article. The concluding part of the paper shows the impact of both Canetti’s satirical style and his theory of death and power on the postmodernism of Jelinek. Jelinek develops and deepens Canetti’s critique of an evolutionary and progressive account of history by citing this discourse. By means of montage and bricolage she subjects an opposition between the rational and irrational, between the primitive and the civilized, to satirical treatment. Jelinek refers to Canetti’s Masse und Macht in order to demystify the ideologies that govern contemporary global societies. Her depiction of the ruler as the radical individual who practices self‐preservation turned wild and reduces everything that does not resemble him to nothingness clearly goes back to Canetti’s fictional and nonfictional work. Her work thus proves the contemporary relevance of Canetti’s analysis of power as death.

The rediscovered writings of Veza Canetti: out of the shadows of a husband

Preece, Julian. The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. 148 pp. $75.00 hardcover. The title of Julian Preece's study refers to the discovery of Veza Canetti's literary works, most of which the Jewish author had published under pseudonyms in the 1930s, prior to Austria's Anschlus to Nazi Germany. Until her husband and Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti oversaw the republication of some of her works in the early 1990s, it had remained largely unknown that his wife of 29 years was an accomplished writer in her own right. In fact many of her stories that she later reworked into the novel Die Gelbe Strase were published in the renowned Arbeiter-Zeitung before Elias Canetti found a publisher for his first literary work (Die Blendung). While Preece, just like previous critics, is unable to determine how large Veza Canetti's unpublished oeuvre was, he provides the most comprehensive account to date of her surviving works: they include two novels (Die Gelbe Strase, Die Schildkreten), a number of short stories (the collection Geduld bringt Rosen, Fund, Schweigegeld, Geld-Geld-Geld, and two dramas (Der Oger, Der Tiger). In addition, he mentions the drama The Palanquin and the story Air Raid, two pieces she wrote during her exile in Britain. The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti is an insightful study of Veza Canetti's literary works and the ways in which they are in constant dialogue with that of her husband. Yet what at times distracted this reader from Preece's informed engagement with their work, is his defensive stance vis-a-vis feminist critics who, according to Preece, have done injustice to Elias Canetti. This stance dominates chapter I which focuses on the controversies caused by the delayed publication of Veza Canetti's works-almost 40 years after her death and during the last years of Elias Canetti's long life. But even beyond this initial chapter, the overall study is marked by an attempt to clear Elias Canetti's name of any suggestions of wrongdoing (e.g., that he deliberately suppressed information on her early success as a writer.) Ironically, the main sources for this defense are Elias Canetti's own accounts since hardly any of Veza Canetti's personal documents survive. Preece approaches Veza and Elias Canetti's works of the 1930s by tracing common themes, topics, and literary techniques and by exploring how they approached particular topics in different ways and with different emphases. While both worked with satire and grotesque, Veza Canetti's stories are more closely related to the social situation of her time and they are more openly critical of social injustices (cf. Die gelhe Strase which Preece calls a minor masterpiece of modernist urban literature). …

Transatlantic Perspectives on Men, Women, and Other Primates: The Ape Motif in Kafka, Canetti, and Cooper's and Jackson's King Kong Films

A comparative reading of Kafka's "Report for an Academy," Canetti's chapter "A Madhouse" from his novel Auto-da-Fé , and Cooper's and Jackson's film versions of King Kong reveals ongoing connections between the discourse on species, gender, race, and the status of human beings within the natural order. The cross-species relationships thematized in the texts suggest a critical or, in the case of Cooper, an optimistic attitude about Western civilization. The human-ape stories central to the texts provide the basic paradigm to examine social conditions and cultural conflicts, but they also serve as a commentary about the relationship of human and non-human animals, and about changing concepts of civilization and nature. The changing configurations of these human-ape relationships provide insight into the changing attitudes toward different species and environmental issues during the 20 th century. (DL)

Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture, and Identity in Joseph Roth's Writing in the 1920s by Jon Hughes

ii88 Reviews D.Phil. thesis on Jiinger'sWorld War Iwritings. Those approaching Jiinger from a comparative perspective will find inKing's rich and illuminating study a helpful summary of the impact of thewar on writers and artists engaged in experimen tationwith form and in the reshaping, sometimes downright abolition, of existing generic conventions. He dwells on awhole swarm ofGerman Expressionist and post Expressionist authors, as well as Freud, examining their reactions to thewar as a background to Jiinger's own work. One may argue with King's assessment of Jiinger as a precursor sui generis of postmodernism (he often speaks of Jiinger's 'deconstruc tive' energy) rather than amere critic ofmodernity, but one unfailingly appreciates King's studious philological research,which unveils important aspects of the texto logy and genesis of Jiinger's textson thewar. The book is amust forJiinger scholars, not least because King has also worked with themanuscript of Jiinger's I9I4-I8 war diaries, which became available to scholars in I996. UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER GALIN TIHANOV Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture, and Identity inJosephRoth's Writing in theI920s. By JONHUGHES. (MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 67; Bithell Series ofDissertations, 30) Leeds: Maney. 2oo6. viii+ 195 PP. ?35; $82. ISBN 978 1-9043 50-37-2. JonHughes's carefully argued, insightfulbook provides a new reading of theworks of JosephRoth in the lightof specificallyWeimar modernity. This approach is justified because Roth's works were published inGermany, notably inBerlin and Munich, until he went into exile in I934. Thereafter he published with German exile presses in theNetherlands. Hughes's study, originally his doctoral dissertation at theUni versity ofWales, Swansea, positions itself within an energetic scholarly debate about theGalicia-born Austro-Hungarian novelist and journalist, who underwent dramatic ideological and literary transformations throughout his career in response to the ca taclysmic changes of the firstpart of the twentieth century. Roth's multiple identities, his life and work, his relationships with women, in cluding the prominent German writer Irmgard Keun, his friendships with other intellectuals, his alcoholism, and his demise inhis Paris exile have inspiredmuch cri tical literature.Roth's works of fiction, some of them topical and with contemporary settings, others harking back to theHabsburg Empire and the East European shtetl culture-worlds that ended with the First World War-continue to draw scholarly attention, as does the still unresolved question about the position of Roth's work, which consists of voluminous novels, travel books, short stories, and essays, within literaryand cultural history. In this study Hughes focuses on theGerman context-Kesten, Kracauer, Ben jamin, Hasenclever, Zuckmayer-but he de-emphasizes Roth's obvious connections to Eastern European Jewish and inter-warViennese literary tradition and culture, noting, notwithout justification,Roth's ambivalence towards regionalism, including theEastern Jewish sphere and Yiddish. On his website devoted to Joseph Roth he accords these latter connections greater weight than in his book (see http://www. geocities.com/roth_online/index.html). Roth's career as a novelist began inVienna with his firstnovel Das Spinnennetz (1923), which was serialized in theprestigious Arbeiter-Zeitung. Since he grew up in the lateHabsburg Empire and started his studies inVienna during the FirstWorld War, the culture of imperialAustria and theFirst Republic were of great importance for Roth's career, including thedistinct expressions ofmodernity theAustrian culture had fostered.Margarete Landwehr has argued that Austrian literatureof that time re flected the transition from 'realism to amodernist subversion of realist conventions', MLR, 102.4, 2007 II89 a situation that she sees expressed inRoth's writing as well and that corresponds to some ofHughes's findings ('Modernist Aesthetics inJosephRoth's Radetzkymarsch: The Crisis ofMeaning and theRole of theReader', German Quarterly, 76 (2003), 398-410 (p. 398)). Introducing theAustrian context more fully by way of Kraus, Musil, Horvath, or Canetti's Die Blendung, aswell as theBerlin connections of these authors, might have added breadth and balance toHughes's study and elucidated Roth's particular strugglewith modernity in a transcultural context. Hughes uses the concept of fragmentation ('Fragmentarisierung', p. 179) as a touchstone of Roth's increasingly modernist writing practice and notes that until the late 1930S the author continued to be obsessed with problems characteristic of the 1920S.Along with Roth's analytic approach tomodernity went, Hughes asserts...

Quixotic Struggles: New Books by and about Elias Canetti

Quixotic Struggles: New Books by and about Elias Canetti ULRICH PLASS Wesleyan University Elias Canetti, Aufzeichnungen f?r Marie-Louise. Ed. by Jeremy Adler. Munich and Vienna: Hanser. 2005. 119 pp. 12,90. isbn 3-446 20594-2. Elias Canetti, Gesammelte Werke, Band 10: Aufs?tze, Reden, Gespr?che. Munich and Vienna: Hanser. 2005. 395 pp. 27,90. isbn 3-446 18520-8. Elias Canetti, Party im Blitz. Die englischen Jahre. Ed. by Kristian Wachinger. Munich and Vienna: Hanser. 2003. 247 pp. 17,90. isbn 3-446-20350-8. Elias Canetti. Biographie. By Sven Hanuschek. Munich and Vienna: Hanser. 2005. 799 pp. 29,90. isbn 3-446-20584-5. Elias Canetti. Bilder aus seinem Leben. Ed. by Kristian Wachinger. Munich and Vienna: Hanser. 2005. 175 pp. 24,90. isbn 3-446-20599-3. Elias Canett?s Counter-Image of Society. Crowds, Power, Transformation. By Johann P. Arnason and David Roberts. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2004. 166 pp. $65.00, ?45.00. isbn 1-571-13160-4. In der Provinz des Lehrers. Rollenbilder und Selbstentw?rfe in Leben und Werk von Elias Canetti. By Bertram Kazmirowski. Frankfurt a. M.: Lang. 2004. 357 pp. 52,80 (excl. VAT), ?37.00. isbn 3-631-53314-4. A Companion to theWorks ofElias Canetti. Ed. by Dagmar e. G. Lorenz. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2004. xiv + 350 pp. $90.00, ?65.00. isbn 1-571-13234-1. Has the reception of Elias Canetti entered a new phase? Predictably, Hanser, his publisher of many decades, has responded to the centenary of his birth with an onslaught of new titles. But other houses have also published new scholarship on Canetti's work. Most notably, Camden House is trying to secure the author a more central place in the English-speaking world with a new study on Canetti's magnum opus, Masse und Macht [Crowds and Power, 1960], and with an excellent and wide-ranging collection of articles in its prestigious Companion series. In his contribution to the latter volume, William Donahue proposes ULRICH PLASS 235 that 'Canetti's death [in 1994] inaugurates a more independent and, I believe, a more fruitful phase of criticism' (p. 26). I would like to emphasize the word independent, since much of Canetti scholarship tends to be heavily influenced by the author's own interpretations. Donahue, then a graduate student, had been on his way to visit the author to talk about his dissertation on Canetti's seminal novel Die Blendung [Auto-da F?, 1935], when the writer's death was first reported in the news, shortly after his clandestine funeral. This anecdote is typical not only for the extent to which Canetti scholars engaged in the practice of seeking the master's approval of their research; it also reiterates another habit of Canetti scholarship: to include biographical reference. Even authors with no anecdotes of their own like to dwell on the fascinating complexity of Canetti's multicultural, multilingual and truly European life. One of the measures of a more independent investigation of Canetti's work will be the degree towhich scholars are able to question the biographical model and to develop categories that are adequate both to the works themselves and to their intellectual and historical context. Since Canetti's global fame was and still ismostly due to his best-selling memoirs, the popular reception of his work has been inseparable from his life.The challenge inwriting thefirstbiography of Canetti lies in reading his autobiographies against the grain, trying to disentangle fiction and fact, Dichtung and Wahrheit. Sven Hanuschek masters this daunting challenge with mixed results. At the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich, he diligently went through some 130 boxes of unpublished papers, including a large number of notes from Canetti's decades of research for Masse und Macht (the more personal documents, diaries and cor respondence, have been sealed off until 2024). However, anyone expecting to find the 'true' Canetti revealed will be disappointed. In his methodological reflections at the beginning of the book, Hanuschek concedes the enormous difficulties of narrating the life and uvre of a mythomaniac and protean poet obsessed with the phenomenon of metamorphosis. Hanuschek embraces Canetti's obsession by declaring the author's innumerable notes to be the...

A Companion to the works of Elias Canetti

The Bulgarian-born scholar and author Elias Canetti was one of the most astute witnesses and analysts of the mass movements and wars of the first half of the 20th century. Born a Sephardic Jew and raised at first in the Bulgarian and Ladino languages, he chose to write in German. He was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature for his oeuvre, which includes dramas, essays, diaries, aphorisms, the novel Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fe) and the long interdisciplinary treatise Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power). These works express Canetti's thought-provoking ideas on culture and the human psyche with special focus on the phenomena of power, conflict, and survival. Canetti's masterful prose, his linguistic innovations, his brilliant satires and conceits continue to fascinate scholarsand general readers alike; his challenging, genre-bending writings merge theory and literature, essay and diary entry. This Companion volume contains original essays by renowned scholars from aroundthe world who examine Canetti's writing and thought in the context of pre- and post-fascist Europe, providing a comprehensive scholarly introduction. Contributors: William C. Donahue, Anne Fuchs, HansReiss, Julian Preece, Wolfgang Mieder, Sigurd P. Scheichel, Helga Kraft, Harriet Murphy, Irene S. Di Maio, Ritchie Robertson, Johannes G. Pankau, Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, Penka Angelova and Svoboda A. Dimitrova, Michael Mack.Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

The Legacy of Kafka in Contemporary Austrian Literature

Filipp, Frank, ed. The Legacy of in Contemporary Literature. Riverside: Ariadne, 1997. $29.50 hardcover. Evaluating the legacy ofa great and extraordinarily influential writer is never an easy task. Such examinations tend to gravitate between the Scylla of positivistic influence study, where subsequent writers openly affirm and admit the impact a prominent literary precursor has had on their work, and the Charybdis of often broad, and hence vague, identification of intellectual or thematic constellations, which attempts to align the work of a later writer with the models of a significant forerunner. Of the nine essays collected in the present volume, only two successfully sail through these treacherous waters. The general problem is compounded in this instance by the sheer stature of as one of the most prominent, most influential of all modern German fiction writers: is there any author who does not share in some way, if only indirectly, in Kafka's legacy? Moreover, what defines Kafka's significance is the way in which his writing has tended to gather together, in concentrated form, many of the issues and dilemmas that have become the hallmarks of European modernism. Here one could go through a litany of terms and phrases, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, alienation, linguistic skepticism, existential angst, bureaucratization of civil life, etc. When contemporary writers articulate such omnipresent themes, are they always doing so in Kafka's name, as it were, or as his heir? Put differently: What criteria can be used to distinguish between the participation in a more generally shared cultural-intellectual problematic and the specific influence of a particular artist, especially one whose reach is as broad as Kafka's? If, as Frank Pilipp maintains in his preface, Austrian literature displays a more concentrated indebtedness to than do other national literatures (2), is it himself or the wider intellectual-historical tradition that explains this affinity? The major failing of the present volume is that it does not address this extremely complex problematic. Over half of the essays in this volume (five of nine) treat two authors who freely admitted Kafka's influence on their writing: Elias Canetti and Peter Handke. Kristie A. Foell points out differences between Kafka's fictional world and that portrayed in Canetti's Die Blendung in order to arrive at the uninspired conclusion that it was Kafka's person and his life, not his manner of writing, that fueled Canetti's imagination. Readers familiar with Canetti's reflections on Kafka's correspondence with Felice Bauer will not be surprised by this assertion. Richard H. Lawson seeks to explore parallels between Kafka's and Canetti's aphoristic writings. However, as becomes clear over the course of his deliberations, what he understands under the term aphorism is simply autobiographical self-expression. This explains why his examples of aphoristic utterances by are drawn solely from his diaries. Lawson completely ignores that both and Canetti were composers of aphoristic texts that reflect a specific literary genre, defined by its employment of rhetorical, structural, and figurative devises. Thus the special sympathetic relationship (34) he identifies between and Canetti is once again grounded in personal-biographical rather than in formal literary issues. Fully three essays address the impact of Kafka's work on Peter Handke. The outstanding contribution in this group, and one of the two outstanding pieces in this collection, is Thomas F Barry's Kafka and Handke: Poetics from Gregor to the Gregors. Barry is not satisfied with cataloging superficial connections between Kafka's and Handke's works; indeed, he expresses some skepticism about the significance of ties such as Handke's proclivity for giving his characters names that invoke those of Kafka's protagonists. Instead, he digs to the psychological level, citing their negative sense of their own body ego as Kafka's and Handke's most profound commonality. …

Die Blendung as a Negative Poetics: Positivism, Nihilism, Fascism

In his representation of a fragmented society and his critique of the positivist scholar Peter Kien, Canetti develops a negative poetics: he shows what the poet should not be and what he should work against. This paves the way for a better understanding of Masse und Macht. Canetti's poetics in many respects resembles the image of the poet as advanced by his friend, the Oxford anthropologist Franz Baermann Steiner. Steiner did not separate his scholarly pursuits from social issues and his literary work. This connection between scholarship and a literary mode of writing constitutes the style and methodology of Masse und Macht and offers a striking contrast to Kien's positivism.

The Legacy of Kafka in Contemporary Austrian Literature

Filipp, Frank, ed. The Legacy of Kafka in Contemporary Austrian Literature. Riverside: Ariadne, 1997. $29.50 hardcover. Evaluating the legacy ofa great and extraordinarily influential writer is never an easy task. Such examinations tend to gravitate between the Scylla of positivistic influence study, where subsequent writers openly affirm and admit the impact a prominent literary precursor has had on their work, and the Charybdis of often broad, and hence vague, identification of intellectual or thematic constellations, which attempts to align the work of a later writer with the models of a significant forerunner. Of the nine essays collected in the present volume, only two successfully sail through these treacherous waters. The general problem is compounded in this instance by the sheer stature of Kafka as one of the most prominent, most influential of all modern German fiction writers: is there any author who does not share in some way, if only indirectly, in Kafka's legacy? Moreover, what defines Kafka's significance is the way in which his writing has tended to gather together, in concentrated form, many of the issues and dilemmas that have become the hallmarks of European modernism. Here one could go through a litany of terms and phrases, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, alienation, linguistic skepticism, existential angst, bureaucratization of civil life, etc. When contemporary writers articulate such omnipresent themes, are they always doing so in Kafka's name, as it were, or as his heir? Put differently: What criteria can be used to distinguish between the participation in a more generally shared cultural-intellectual problematic and the specific influence of a particular artist, especially one whose reach is as broad as Kafka's? If, as Frank Pilipp maintains in his preface, "Austrian literature displays a more concentrated indebtedness to Kafka" than do other national literatures (2), is it Kafka himself or the wider Austrian intellectual-historical tradition that explains this affinity? The major failing of the present volume is that it does not address this extremely complex problematic. Over half of the essays in this volume (five of nine) treat two Austrian authors who freely admitted Kafka's influence on their writing: Elias Canetti and Peter Handke. Kristie A. Foell points out differences between Kafka's fictional world and that portrayed in Canetti's Die Blendung in order to arrive at the uninspired conclusion that it was Kafka's person and his life, not his manner of writing, that fueled Canetti's imagination. Readers familiar with Canetti's reflections on Kafka's correspondence with Felice Bauer will not be surprised by this assertion. Richard H. Lawson seeks to explore parallels between Kafka's and Canetti's aphoristic writings. However, as becomes clear over the course of his deliberations, what he understands under the term "aphorism" is simply autobiographical self-expression. This explains why his examples of aphoristic utterances by Kafka are drawn solely from his diaries. Lawson completely ignores that both Kafka and Canetti were composers of aphoristic texts that reflect a specific literary genre, defined by its employment of rhetorical, structural, and figurative devises. Thus the "special sympathetic relationship" (34) he identifies between Kafka and Canetti is once again grounded in personal-biographical rather than in formal literary issues. Fully three essays address the impact of Kafka's work on Peter Handke. The outstanding contribution in this group, and one of the two outstanding pieces in this collection, is Thomas F Barry's "Kafka and Handke: Poetics from Gregor to the Gregors." Barry is not satisfied with cataloging superficial connections between Kafka's and Handke's works; indeed, he expresses some skepticism about the significance of ties such as Handke's proclivity for giving his characters names that invoke those of Kafka's protagonists. Instead, he digs to the psychological level, citing their negative sense of their own "body ego" as Kafka's and Handke's most profound commonality. …

Text and Metatext in Canetti's Fictional World

Few novels have had such an impact on the modemrn receptive consciousness, forDie Blendung presents the reader with an extremely complex fictional universe that problematizes the very relationship between text and context, the word and the world, story and history, signifier and signified. What is at stake here is the very possibility of the novel and, by extension, oftext in general to make any kind of meaning, to extract a minimal signification from the historical phenomena it purports to metaphorize. Because of the insurmountable gap between text and context, between story and history, the novel, as the privileged tool of literary expression--Canetti seems to be saying--must perforce manifest, in the metaphor at least, its inability to channel the devastation of history through language. If the novel is to signify, it must incorporate the breakdown of signification. Its positivity, in effect, lies in its failure to mean. It has been claimed that Die Blendung, because of this insurmountable gap between text and context, does not seem to refer to concrete phenomena in the historical reality of the period in any immediate way, that it does not even make note of the contextual events which have, no doubt, accompanied its production, and that the metaphor is so overdone in Canetti's novel that one questions the very legitimacy of its referents. This novel, much like the modem and postmodern novel, is autotelic in nature, its metatextual dimension being quite evident on the surface of the text. It is not without reason that the main protagonists of Die Blendung are involved with writing: in fact, the problematic of writing seems to be the main concern of the novel. By profession, Kien deals with the corruption of ancient texts and the restoration of their truth. He is also preoccupied with the proper recording of phenomenaalbeit sometimes trivial phenomena--in his notebook of stupidities, that notebook the purpose of which is to establish a oneto-one relationship between the event in life d its rendering in the text in order to accede to a better understanding of the event. Sometimes, Kien draws long catalogues to help him locate books after he leaves his library, or the mental Liste der unschuldigen Bucher, die er zu Fall gebracht hatte (BD 119). Fischerle, too, keeps a special kind of diary: namely, one of chess champions in which he records the basic data of their biographies, a limited version of the story of their lives. And, finally, Therese makes her own list, that of the stock in the library which she draws on strips of newspaper, she also specializes in a particular kind of writing: the writing of the letter 0 and its numerical counterpart, the zero.

Recent Books on (Or by) Nobel Laureates

Despite the high-sounding standards of the Nobel award for literature (the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency) and the accompanying intrafraternal jousting (or perhaps because of them), the critic's immediate sense from year to year is more one of disparateness than of homogeneousness. How could it be otherwise: different human beings (writers), with perhaps even more different cultural backgrounds, and writing for widely divergent groups of readers, who are themselves widely divergent individuals. And yet of these four books about, and one by, Nobel laureates, selected not exactly randomly but with no particular prerequisite other than accessibility-in every sense-in the five books listed above, then, it came as a welcome surprise that at least four share a wholly or partly revisionist point of departure and conclusion. I'm going to start with David Darby's book on Elias Canetti, the 1981 laureate, because, first, it is a persuasive exemplar of the revisionism just described and, second, because I am most at home in Canetti criticism. In a nutshell, Darby abandons Canetti's quasi-anthropological Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power) as a primary critical guidepost to Canetti's only novel, Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fe or The Tower of Babel). Instead he approaches the novel with attention to its own formal features and in terms of its rela-

The Sense of an Ending. Apocalyptic Perspectives in the 20th‐century German Novel.

This paper sets out to examine how the historical understanding of the novelist in 20th‐century Germany manifests itself in his conclusions. the novels of the period 1914 to 1945 which are analysed in the light of their “sense of an ending” are Der Untertan, Der Zauberberg, Doktor Faustus, Die Jugend und Vollendung des Henri Quatre, Die Schlafwandler and Die Blendung, with reference also to Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and with Die Blechtrommel as a postscript to the apocalypse of the Third Reich. the apocalyptic consciousness revealed in these novels requires to be seen as part of the larger eschatological pattern of an end and a beginning, a pattern, however, which we find crossed in our novels by a mythical or cyclical conception of history as eternal return. This interference of the two conceptions suggests an ongoing question behind the need to give meaning to contemporary history, which is perhaps resolvable only on an aesthetic level: “Zu Ende haben wir sie [die Geschichte] erzählt” (Th. Mann).

ELIAS CANETTI'S DIE BLENDUNG AND THE CHANGING IMAGE OF MADNESS

German Life and LettersVolume 26, Issue 1 p. 38-46 ELIAS CANETTI'S DIE BLENDUNG AND THE CHANGING IMAGE OF MADNESS Edward A. Thomson, Edward A. ThomsonSearch for more papers by this author Edward A. Thomson, Edward A. ThomsonSearch for more papers by this author First published: October 1972 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0483.1972.tb00804.xCitations: 3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume26, Issue1October 1972Pages 38-46 RelatedInformation