University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann January 2006 Part One: Bachmann and History, Chapter 2. Bachmann's Feminist Reception Sara Lennox Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/umpress_cotmd Lennox, Sara, "Part One: Bachmann and History, Chapter 2. Bachmann's Feminist Reception" (2006). Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann. 4. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/umpress_cotmd/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CHAPTER 2 Bachmann’s Feminist Reception One must in general be able to read a book in different ways and to read it differently today than tomorrow. (Ingeborg Bachmann, Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden) Every reader, when he reads, is in reality a reader of himself. —Ingeborg Bachmann, Werke, quoting Proust Since the late 1970s, the enthusiastic response of feminist readers, critics, and scholars to the writing of Ingeborg Bachmann has produced a radical reassessment of her work. As I explained in chapter 1, she owed her reputation during her lifetime to the two highly accomplished volumes of lyric poetry she published in the 1950s, Die gestundete Zeit and Anrufung des Großen Bären. Her critics responded more negatively to her subsequent attempts at prose fiction, The Thirtieth Year (1961) and the first finished volumes of her “Ways of Death” cycle, Malina (1971) and Three Paths to the Lake (1972).