The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek

Konzett's study focuses on the new literary strategies with which the Austrian writers Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, and the late Thomas Bernhard engage their readers in critical self-perception. Each articulates a unique model of dissent, combining avant-garde and mainstream techniques of writing that cut across modes of literary discourse and reception. Their writings expose and attack conventions of pre-arranged consensus and harmonization that block the ongoing negotiations necessary for the development of multi-cultural awareness. Bernhard, Handke, and Jelinek question particularly Austria's mono-ethnic and naively accepted national heritage that allows for the unproblematic maintenance of tradition and an apologetic attitude toward the past. Konzett shows that each of the three writers poses the question of national dissent differently. Handke focuses on post-ideological voices that are suppressed in the account of the history of the marginal individual; Bernhard exposes a coercive climate of historical amnesia and national self-canonization; Jelinek confronts the increasing commodification of all cultural identity. All three aim in their rhetoric of national dissent to express alternative, post-national identities for the new multi-cultural Europe. Matthias Konzett is associate professor of German at Yale University.