Abstracts "Back to the Future: Austrian Literary Identity and the Reenvisioning of Homer's Odyssey" Our traditions may be the glue that binds us together, but they can also be the cage that robs us of our freedom. They form identity, but often prohibit or at least hinder the growth process during those times when a new identity must be forged. This conflict between identity and tradition is especially problematic in modern Austria, as the pillars of identity seem rooted in traditions that are either lost (like the Habsburg Empire), shameful (like Nazism and the Waldheim scandal), or socially problematic (like the new and troublesome association with the EU, or the Heimat kitsch served up to tourists). While the social aspect of the Austrian identity crisis have found their expression in the current wave of Haider-mania, many writers and intellectuals seem to be addressing these issues with more constructive tactics. One of these tactics has involved the rewriting of the origins of Western literary tradition, as if to reappropriate literature from the point of its very outset. Given the difficulties tradition creates for identity, it makes sense that Austrian authors writing in the late 20th Century would find themselves drawn to Homer, and more particularly to his Odyssey. As opposed to the Iliad, the Odyssey is the story of a man looking to regain his home, his family and the material aspects if his identity.This, I would argue, is the same project pursued by the Austrian authors reworking his text, authors who establish themselves as visionaries by reenvisioning their past, rather than their future. In her 1989 treatment of the subject, Eine ganz gewöhnliche Ehe, Odysseus und Penelope, Inge Merkl takes first steps toward renewing a connection to the epic and its concerns by fleshing out the details of a relationship that seems enigmatic at best to modern readers. By inventing for us of the feelings courtship, separation and reunion of Odysseus and Penelope, Merkl makes the story suitable to her own time and place, and far more comprehensible from a contemporary feminist point of view. Nearly a decade later, Michael Köhlmeier was able to build upon the work already done by Merkl, however, in that he more than makes the story contemporary. By adding details and ideas drawn from what is quite clearly not just modern context , but especially a modern Austrian context, Köhlmeier's work not only reshapes the beginnings of literary tradition, he makes this tradition into a suitable point of departure for a new Austrian literary identity. abstract-liste | core | home | kunstraum.gleisdorf [47•01] |
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