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Reading Tristan in Ingeborg Bachmann's Ich weiss keine bessere Welt and Malina
Author(s) -
McMurtry Áine
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0483.2007.00404.x
Subject(s) - counterpoint , poetry , textuality , musical , literature , dream , representation (politics) , art , narrative , reading (process) , metonymy , expression (computer science) , art history , philosophy , politics , metaphor , sociology , psychology , linguistics , law , pedagogy , neuroscience , political science , computer science , programming language
This paper examines how the recent, controversial collection of Ingeborg Bachmann's draft poems, Ich weiß keine bessere Welt (2000), casts new light on the genesis of the acclaimed Todesarten prose. Identifying the poetological interest of the texts, the article seeks to expand the predominantly biographical response to the collection and clarify how the experience of crisis provoked a move towards prose forms during the 1960s. The article focuses on the problem of the aesthetic representation of crisis through examination of references to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in the draft poems and in Malina , the novel published later. It explores how, in the poems, the musical motifs and allusions enable primary engagement with aspects of experience conventionally excluded from the public sphere and how the same intertextual references are developed into a sophisticated aesthetic strategy in the novel's central dream chapter, whilst retaining the crucial concern with problems of expression. Drawing on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arnold Schönberg and Theodor W. Adorno, ultimately the paper illuminates the beginnings of a textuality that arises out of personal crisis but develops into a metonymic mode using dream narrative and musical counterpoint to enable oblique expression of gendered cultural critique.