Austria’s Ambiguous Smile: Transnational Perspectives on Austrian Belatedness in the Fiction of John Irving

TY - CHAP

T1 - Austria’s Ambiguous Smile

T2 - Transnational Perspectives on Austrian Belatedness in the Fiction of John Irving

AU - Schofield, Benedict

N1 - Paper originally presented at the Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film and Culture International Conference held at the University of Nottingham in April 2015.

PY - 2018/10/7

Y1 - 2018/10/7

N2 - This chapter undertakes a transnational reading of Austria’s post-war belatedness and Vergangenheitsbewältigung through an analysis of the representation of Austria in the novels of the American author John Irving. It explores how Irving’s works from the late 1960s to the late 1980s present post-war Austria as a site of both fascination and contempt in the international imagination, and argues that Irving’s transnational perspective forms a consistent, highly interventionist critique of Austria’s memory politics, especially in the years leading to the 1986 Waldheim Affair. It focuses on Irving’s literary representation of Austria and especially of Vienna: first as a post-war tourist idyll; then as a site of hidden but not repressed anti-Semitism; and finally as a relic of the Habsburg Empire. Ultimately, it argues that Irving’s transnational perspective on Austria’s past is critically distinct to that within Austria, marked by his ferocity, his focus on the capital, and his earliness.

AB - This chapter undertakes a transnational reading of Austria’s post-war belatedness and Vergangenheitsbewältigung through an analysis of the representation of Austria in the novels of the American author John Irving. It explores how Irving’s works from the late 1960s to the late 1980s present post-war Austria as a site of both fascination and contempt in the international imagination, and argues that Irving’s transnational perspective forms a consistent, highly interventionist critique of Austria’s memory politics, especially in the years leading to the 1986 Waldheim Affair. It focuses on Irving’s literary representation of Austria and especially of Vienna: first as a post-war tourist idyll; then as a site of hidden but not repressed anti-Semitism; and finally as a relic of the Habsburg Empire. Ultimately, it argues that Irving’s transnational perspective on Austria’s past is critically distinct to that within Austria, marked by his ferocity, his focus on the capital, and his earliness.

KW - Austrian Studies

KW - Austrian Literature

KW - American Studies

KW - American Literature

KW - John Irving

KW - Kurt Waldheim

KW - TRANSNATIONALISM

KW - Identity Politics

UR - https://doi.org/10.3726/b11389/15

U2 - 10.3726/b11389/15

DO - 10.3726/b11389/15

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9783034319843

T3 - Studies in Modern German and Austrian Literature

BT - New Perspectives on Contemporary Austrian Literature and Culture

A2 - Krylova, Katya

PB - Peter Lang

CY - Oxford

ER -