Intertextual Interventions in the Novels of Marlene Streeruwitz and Lilian Faschinger
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INTERTEXTUAL INTERVENTIONS IN THE NOVELS OF MARLENE STREERUWITZ AND LILIAN FASCHINGER LYNNE HALLAM, MA Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy DECEMBER 2012 ABSTRACT This thesis considers prose texts by the Austrian authors Marlene Streeruwitz and Lilian Faschinger from the viewpoint of intertextuality. The research does not rely on the narrow definitions of intertextuality which are concerned with the appearance of an anterior text in a later text, or on studies of source and influence. Rather my treatment of the novels considers the way meanings are constructed by a network of cultural and social discourses which embody distinct codes, expectations and assumptions. This study discusses the ways in which the chosen texts, through their intertexts, display a postmodern impetus towards reappropriating authorized discourse in new and challenging ways, from feminist perspectives. My intertextual readings are alert to two main threads – the critique of aspects of Austrian society evident in the novels of Streeruwitz and Faschinger and their place within the tradition of Österreich-Beschimpfung, and the interventions into issues pertaining to gender. I examine thematic similarities and differences in the texts, which draw attention to specifically Austrian or gender related issues, as well as scrutinizing formal and linguistic elements. Ultimately, my thesis poses and suggests answers to questions regarding strategies of intervention by feminist authors and the fruitfulness of intertextual readings. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My greatest thanks must go to my supervisor, Franziska Meyer, whose constant encouragement, expert and inspirational guidance, and most of all unfailing confidence in me made this thesis possible. I owe further thanks to my second supervisor, Matthias Uecker, whose insightful comments and intellectual rigour proved invaluable. I would like to thank the University of Nottingham’s School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies for their generous financial grants which supported my research trips to Vienna. Many thanks also to The Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies at the University of London for awarding me a William Robson-Scott Travelling Scholarship. Finally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my family: my parents, whose emotional and financial support enabled me to undertake this project in the first place, my husband, whose love, positive outlook and technical advice facilitated its writing, and Rachel and Luke, to whom it is dedicated. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii TABLE OF CONTENTS iii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 13 THEORETICAL AND CULTURAL FRAMEWORKS CHAPTER TWO 46 CULTURAL RE-WRITINGS 2.1 Cultural clashes and the survival of the female voice: 50 Faschinger’s Die neue Scheherazade (1986) 2.2 From Movie Star to Cyborg: Streeruwitz’s Norma 90 Desmond. A Gothic SF – Novel (2002) CHAPTER THREE 130 CONSTRUCTING/PERFORMING THE FEMALE SELF 3.1 Confession and masquerade: Faschinger’s Magdalena 135 Sünderin (1995) 3.2 The loneliness of a Viennese runner: Streeruwitz’s Jessica, 170 30. (2004) CHAPTER FOUR 202 HISTORICAL REVISIONS 4.1 Vienna, the imagined city. The city as (inter)text in 206 Faschinger’s Wiener Passion (1999) 4.2 From fact to fiction: Streeruwitz’s Nachwelt. Ein 245 Reisebericht. (1999) CONCLUSION 277 BIBLIOGRAPHY 283 iii INTRODUCTION We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what conventions demand. Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all; they are what we must use to make new fictions, new narratives. Carolyn Heilbrun1 Intertextuality is based upon the assumption that all texts, far from being autonomous creations with finite meanings, are in fact fragments that reach out from beyond their pages in to other domains, preceding or contemporary to their own, for their construction and meaning. This thesis argues that the Austrian authors Lilian Faschinger and Marlene Streeruwitz produce texts which actively perform and foreground their intertextuality, i.e. their construction out of available discursive possibilities. Through close intertextual readings of six novels written between 1986 and 2004, this study sets out to establish that the urge to interrogate specifically female agency and the production of female subjectivity lies at the centre of the texts’ agendas. Streeruwitz and Faschinger are prominent voices in Austrian literature, yet, as I will argue, a lack of attention to the intertextuality of their novels has led to omissions in previous scholarship with regards to the dialogic richness of the authors’ prose works. There has been little attempt made to approach the texts from the standpoint of theories of intertextuality, and I will show that the intertextual practices which are central features of the texts are highly effective tools of political, feminist critique.2 By employing strands of intertextual 1 Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Ballantine, 1988), p. 37. 2 Christa Gasz’s thesis on Streeruwitz and intertextuality explores the author’s novels Verführungen., Lisa’s Liebe. and Partygirl. from the standpoint of allusions to other works of literature such as Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe, references to music and TV programmes, and genre indicators. Gasz’s study differs from the present one in that it does not set out to identify sites of political interventions in discursive and ideological formations. See 1 theory, I will contend that the authors’ works incorporate signs of discourses that circulate within culture and consciously establish the ground for new meanings to emerge. In doing so, they subvert the dominant ideologies which are rooted in patriarchal discourses. What is important for this thesis is the notion that rather than existing in isolation, individual identities are located and performed in discourse. This term is employed in a Foucauldian sense to indicate those areas of knowledge that construct subjects and subject matter, shape and constrain them, and are themselves vulnerable to change. For Foucault, interrogating discourse involved discovering, ‘who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak [...] and which store and distribute the things that are said’.3 At issue here is the way in which individuals are ‘put into discourse’ and socially produced through language. This approach seeks to understand power relations exercised through the conventions of domains of knowledge, those things which come to acquire the status of the ‘natural’ or ‘common-sense’. In the novels of Faschinger and Streeruwitz considered here, these domains are primarily concerned with female and male bodies, sexuality, familial hierarchies, historical narratives and religious teachings. Their writing will be shown to be dependent upon, and set within, recognizable relations of power with a particular emphasis on gender. The ways in which female protagonists are positioned within discourses that form a common consensus, and the manner in which textual strategies challenge that positioning, will form a central argument of this thesis. Christa Gasz, Intertextualität in der Prosa Marlene Streeruwitz’ (unpublished Diplomarbeit, University of Vienna, 2005). 3 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1, trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1978, first pub. 1976), p. 11. 2 The authors have been chosen for their foregrounding of intertextuality, the fact that they share an Austrian background, and that they speak from similar political agendas. Writing as a form of resistance is central to the authorial projects of both writers, and both have reflected on writing as a means by which to claim and exercise female agency. Indeed, Streeruwitz has written and spoken extensively in a series of Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen on the process of her own fictional writing and its potentially politically transformative effect. The very act of writing is, for Streeruwitz, a political act; it is a means by which both reader and writer can recognize and analyze the discursive relations that constitute individuals as subjects: ‘Wir sind Gemachte, die versuchen müssen, die eigene Machart herauszufinden. Und die Konstruktionsgeheimnisse aufzudecken’.4 Interrogating their ‘Machart’ is the task of the enunciating subject who searches for ‘secrets’ of subject construction. This is not to be mistaken as a call to uncover an essential secret of the feminine that strives to construct a female space outside of patriarchal discourse. What is secret in our ‘Konstruktion’ is that which remains hidden from view by processes of normalization through language. For Streeruwitz, language is ‘(die) Sprache des Patriarchats’5 as it is colonized by norms, orderings and classifications which subordinate the interests of women to those of a dominant system that endorses male power. Resistance for Streeruwitz takes place from within the norms and orderings of power relations that structure all aspects of life, that is through enunciations of existing discourse 4 Marlene Streeruwitz, Können. Mögen. Dürfen. Sollen. Wollen. Müssen. Lassen. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 40. 5 Ibid., p. 17. 3 which are violated by textual and linguistic interventions, which then allow the emergence of alternative significations. The author maintains: