H.C.Artmann und die apolitische Avantgarde: eine Studie zur proteischen Autorschaft.

Abstract

This thesis seeks to provide an approach to the peculiarly hermetic works of the Austrian writer Hans Carl Artmann (1921-2000) by developing an analytical pattern of ‘protean authorship’. The definition of this term by the example of Artmann’s life and work is one of the main aims of this study. The concept of the protean, derived from the psychological phenomenon first analyzed in 1993, describes a specific human existence devoid of biographical and emotional stability but, at the same time, cunningly capable of developing several existential strategies to compensate these shortcomings. The concept of the protean author reflects these strategies. Protean authors are instable and highly unreliable narrators. Their works use extensive intertextuality and mystification strategies that mirror their personal instability. Their work shows a predominance of short fragmented and often narratively incoherent textual structures that mark the absence of a grand narrative. Thus the protean authorship pattern is inherently postmodern but can also be found in modernist and even earlier times, which makes it a useful tool to classify patterns of aesthetic production that defy their historical and contextual characteristics. After an overview of the state of the current Artmann research and a discussion of the methodological problems with respect to his authorship, Robert J. Lifton’s theoretical concept of the protean self is introduced and read against the possible methods to approach Artmann’s works and authorship on a structural level. A reading is suggested that concentrates on the paratextual, the gestural and the instable, rhizomatic element of author and text. Thus the aesthetic preconditions for a discussion of the protean elements in Artmann’s works are introduced. In the last two chapters the protean element in Artmann’s writing is defined and a pattern of characteristics of a protean authorship is developed. A summary of the results is then followed by a brief outlook on possible ways of using the concept of protean authorship in other cases of 20th century literature.