NEWS AND EVENTS ARCHIVE (2009-2014)
Archive
Elfriede Jelinek Reading and Discussion Group
Date: 28 January 2016 Time: 16.00
Venue: Bowland North B 67
This is a group of people from DELC and LICA who are interested in or are working on the writing of Austrian author and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Elfriede Jelinek. This first session invites us to share views on a first chunk of reading from her 2005 play Ulrike Maria Stuart. The play was premièred in 2006 but has only just appeared in print. Alas, there is no English translation. If you are interested in attending this session (open to all), please let us know. Equally, if you'd like to come to a future one (perhaps to see a screening of this play or to talk about translation techniques etc.), we'd also like to hear from you.
Our group might be of interest to any colleagues and students of History, LICA, Sociology (Gender & Women's Studies, in particular).
Jelinek's play draws on the biographies of two Rote Armee Fraktion terrorists, Gudrin Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. It interweaves its 'action' with parallels drawn from two other famous women from history - namely Maria Stuart and Elisabeth I.
Click here for a review of the première: http://www.zeit.de/news/artikel/2006/10/27/78622.xml
Some information in English is available on the Goethe Institute's web pages: http://www.goethe.de/kue/the/nds/nds/aut/jel/stu/en5065696.htm
One reviewer describes Jelinek's play as follows:
In Jelinek's play, Schiller's historical heroines merge with Meinhof and Ensslin, two enemies of the state, to form the synthetic figures of Ulrike/Mary and Gudrun/Elizabeth. The women's flow of language, consisting of hybrid verbal constructions, statements ripped out of context and historical and literary quotations, reveals the impossibility of combining the ambition, the will and the deed. Jelinek makes the queens despair at their own meaninglessness and aimlessness, like restless unredeemed spirits of history."(Schauspiel Hannover, 2007)
Contact:
Who can attend: Anyone
Further information
Associated staff: Allyson Fiddler
Organising departments and research centres: European Languages and Cultures, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts
Keywords: Austria, Contemporary women's writing, German language, culture and society, German studies and text analysis , History of gender, Postdramatic theatre, Terrorism, Theatre history, Women's narratives