Kotelevskaya Vera Vladimirovna – Cand. Sc. (Philology), Associate Professor at the Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, Institute of Philology, Journalism and Intercultural Communication, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia, ORCID: 0000-0002-2650-7462
This article compares the work of Austrian modernists Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard as poetics of deformations. The Chinese Wall is chosen as Kafka’s key poetological metaphor: the lacunas and ruins found in it appear as a metaphor of Kafka’s own method. The fragmentary nature and incompleteness of the fictive world and text, the inexpressibility of metaphysical meanings, and the conviction in the ‘falsity’ of any spoken truth are the signs in which the similarities between Kafka’s and Bernhard’s styles are manifested. An important factor that deforms discourse is the notion of writing’s excessiveness, the scriptor’s “borderland”. The interpretation reveals the techniques of “reduction” and “addition”, forming, on the one hand, a minimalist style, and, on the other hand, “mannerism” (the stylistics of inversions, digressions, exaggerations, repetitions). Both tendencies testify to the crisis of the classical poetics of integrity.
Franz Kafka; Thomas Bernhard; modernism; Austrian literature; grotesque; fragmentation; uncertainty; non-finalism.
Download textFor citing: Kotelevskaya V.V. F. Kafka and T. Bernhard: poetics of deformations. Humanitarian aspects. Moscow: INION RAN. Vol. 3(59). Р. 22-43. DOI: 10.31249/chel/2024.03.02