Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation: The Goalie's Journey Home (Literary Frontiers Edition)

by Jerome Klinkowitz

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In 1966, Peter Handke disturbed the world of German letters with the publication of his first novel and with his attacks on the complacency of German-language writers and their audiences. Since then, Handke--an Austrian whose works include drama, poetry, and critical theory as well as fiction--has become a leading European figure in the internationally established postmodern movement. Klinkowitz and Knowlton survey Handke's progress as a writer, concentrating on his novels, to determine show more whether his creativity has been exhausted by his persistent assault on the systems that underlie conventional fiction, drama, and poetry. By placing Handke's work in the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez's magic realism and Donald Barthelme's innovative fictions, the authors demonstrate that postmodern writers can create works of art in which content is effaced and the process of composition assumes increasing importance. Indeed, in so doing, Handke has made that process as humanly interesting and as fictionally dramatic as any stories of The Great Tradition: he has learned to address the human condition within the limits of a rebellious aesthetic. The lesson of the postmodern transformation, Klinkowitz and Knowlton argue, is that the abstraction of content is not a loss; instead, it leads directly to the most essential human concerns. show less

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35+ Works 411 Members
Jerome Klinkowitz is a professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa.

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Genres
Fiction and Literature, Literature Studies and Criticism
DDC/MDS
838.91409Literature & rhetoricGerman & related literaturesGerman miscellaneous writings1900-1900-19901945-1990Individual authors not limited to one specific form : description; critical appraisal; biography; collected works
LCC
PT2668 .A5 .Z75Language and LiteratureGerman, Dutch and Scandinavian literaturesGerman literatureIndividual authors or works1961-2000
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