Home/Page/Source: What She Wants Me to See

Douglas Martin • Wesleyan University

February 17th @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons

With crowning achievement in the Nobel Prize, Elfriede Jelinek’s over-half-century of output incorporates not only personal politics but global ills, damning critique of nationalistic narratives, and traces devastation wrought in the nexus of church and state and capitalism’s ceaseless churn of human resources. Her eleven or so novels display shades of challenge and impatience with conventional story-making, entertainments of suspense, search, and release, while her up-to-the-minute playwrighting is predominantly cast as “post-dramatic.” This talk will proceed both directly and allusively alongside a study of Jelinek's life-work’s contours with those tonal registers marshaling high and low German, regional (“colloquial Austrian”) dialects, pop and classical composition, and what has proven a ballast against the writer’s own family dramas. Addressed as well will be the writer's fledgling attempts to render into American English poems Jelinek wrote in her early twenties.

Energy and Exhaustion
View Spring 2025 Lecture List

Center for the Humanities · 95 Pearl Street, Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/humanities

Wesleyan Logo