Edge of Irony : Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler’s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories—an “Austro-Modernism” that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus’s drama __The Last Days of Mankind__ and Elias Canetti’s memoir __The Tongue Set Free__ to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notebooks and Paul Celan’s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers. Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and polyglot world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan. For them, the trauma of the First World War included the sudden dissolution of the geographical entity into which they were born. Austria, the small, fragile republic that emerged from the Empire in 1918, became in Karl Kraus s words the research laboratory for world destruction. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of WWI Vienna and other former Hapsburg territoriesan Austro-Modernist ethos that strangely anticipates the darkness and cynicism of our own disillusioned twenty-first-century culture. Perloff introduces works in a variety of genresdrama (Kraus s Last Days of Mankind ), the novel (Roth s The Radetzky March ), the essay (central to Robert Musil s The Man without Qualities ), the memoir (Elias Canetti s The Tongue Set Free ), the lyric poem (Celan s love poetry), and the philosophical notebook (Wittgenstein)so as to give even non-specialists a sense of the complex and troubled literary scene created in the shadow of empire and war. These writers created a deeply skeptical and resolutely individualistic modernismone much less ideologically charged, for example, than its counterpart in Germany. Austro-Modernism was not avant-garde in the usual senses, Perloff shows. But its savage and grotesquely comic irony, its conviction, most memorably expressed by Wittgenstein, that argumentation was best conveyed through aphorism, its fondness for paradox and contradiction as modes of understanding, and its early embrace of an aesthetics of documentation and appropriationthese may well be the most lasting legacies of any modernist movement. Austro-Modernism emerges here as a vital alternative, not only to the French and Anglo-American modernisms that have largely defined the period, but also to Weimar and the Frankfurt School, so central to Anglo-American cultural studies. Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler's Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories--an 2Austro-Modernism3 that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus's drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebooks and Paul Celan's lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers. -- From publisher's website Contents......Page 8 List of Illustrations......Page 10 Preface......Page 12 Introduction: The Making of Austro-Modernism......Page 18 1: The Mediated War: Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind......Page 36 2: The Lost Hyphen: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March......Page 58 3: “The Subjunctive of Possibilities”: Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities......Page 96 4: Coming of Age in Kakania: Mother Tongue and Identity Theft in Canetti’s Autobiography......Page 126 5: The Last Habsburg Poet: Paul Celan’s Love Poetry and the Limits of Language......Page 150 Coda: Becoming a “Different” Person: Wittgenstein’s “Gospels”......Page 178 Notes......Page 196 Index......Page 220