Elfriede Jelinek: Provokationen der Kunst

The work of Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek has significantly expanded the possibilities of literary aesthetics over the past five decades—almost consistently through the polemical questioning and denial of prevailing doctrines. The contributions of this volume illuminate, through selected examples from different phases of her work, the aesthetic provocations of Jelinek's writings and place them in the context of the artistic avant-garde, whose destructions in the literary field have always led to productive revisions. From this perspective, it becomes clear to what extent the specific aesthetic challenge posed by the texts is primarily directed at art itself and encompasses central areas of poetics, literary politics, authorship, intertextuality, and intermediality. The provocations of art, it turns out, are accompanied by a new understanding of literature, which is manifested not least in the aesthetic configuration of the texts themselves.