Title: Peter Handke
Description: "Peter Handke is probably the most versatile and controversial of the postwar generation of German-speaking writers. His status as Austria's most renowned living author - a dubious honor, in his opinion - owes as much to his artistic range (plays, novels, a memoir, film scripts, radio plays, poems, and essays) as it does to his reputation for flouting literary and theatrical convention. Handke was only 24 when, in 1966, he challenged the strategic direction of the Gruppe 47 - by then an "establishment" coalition, of German-speaking writers and artists - and later that year assaulted what he considered the "lies" of the theater in Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience), rejecting the 1960s' theatrical norms of illusion, subjectivity, and political indoctrination. In his works of the intervening 27 years Handke has sought to show how visual perception, verbal expression, and memory can distort reality." "In this comprehensive assessment of Handke's writing, Richard Arthur Firda attributes the author's international readership (many of Handke's books were translated into English before he turned 40) to his career-long flair for publicity, a talent for sensing the future direction of not only the marketplace but also the avant-garde. Firda maintains that such works as Handke's phenomenally successful Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1972; The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) have linked him intimately with the European postmodern aesthetic, with the cutting edge of literary experimentation."

"Although the failure of language as valid communication is a theme common to all Handke's work, Firda argues that Handke in fact uses language as a precision tool - so much so that language would seem the only discernible "hero" of his explorations. In Kaspar (1968), for instance - perhaps Handke's best-known play - a mute is successfully subjected to "speech torture", but his mastery of words does not guarantee lasting control over the objects words signify, and in the end the conventions of language succumb to chaos." "Firda sees Handke's 1966 refutation of the Gruppe 47 as a watershed event in the shaping of postwar European literature. Whereas the Gruppe 47 sought to renew German language and literature on moral and ethical issues and staunchly defended German literature as a means for social regeneration, Handke found inspiration in the likes of French prose theoretician Alain Robbe-Grillet and theater of the absurd dramatists Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. According to Firda, Handke admits feeling the need to find "another country," another Austria, and he expects to find this country in "language," as revealed in the process of writing." "Having lived abroad in Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Berlin, and Paris for many years, Handke seems more a writer of modern Europe than of his native Austria. This introduction to the writings of such a complex writer should prove essential reading to students interested in the literature of the new Europe."--Jacket.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation
People: Peter Handke