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Peter Handke's Kaspar: The Mechanics Of Language—A Fractionating Schizophrenic Theatrical Event, Bettina L. Knapp Jun 1990

Peter Handke's Kaspar: The Mechanics Of Language—A Fractionating Schizophrenic Theatrical Event, Bettina L. Knapp

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Theatre, for Handke, has neither object nor subject. concepts, values, functional systems of signification, verifiable contents are non existent in Kaspar. Words alone are of import; they alone create reality.

Words, therefore, and not subjective evaluations of them, are acceptable to Handke, Comparisons, associations, metaphors, or references prevent people from dealing directly with the object itself (the signified), inviting them to have recourse to a "system of differences," to use Derrida's expression, thus contrasting or modifying one with the other. Evaluation breeds buffers and hierarchies; it encourages people to rank or compute ideas, notions, or feelings, and therefore …


Text As Locus, Inscription As Identity: On Barbara Honigmann's Roman Von Einem Kinde , Marilyn Sibley Fries Jun 1990

Text As Locus, Inscription As Identity: On Barbara Honigmann's Roman Von Einem Kinde , Marilyn Sibley Fries

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Barbara Honigmann's Roman von einem Kinde (1986) constitutes the author's attempt at narrative self-definition. In this and other regards, it is similar to Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (1976; Patterns of Childhood, 1980), with which it is briefly compared.

Honigmann's slim collection of stories, conceived by her as "sketches for self-portraits and landscapes," depicts the absolute isolation ofthe female Jewish narrator in the GDR and her search for community (Heimat) via language. Simultaneously, it records that narrator's desire to identify "places of transition," "boundaries at which conditions change" without fixing these in a static prison of text. The narrator-mother …