Elfriede Jelinek (2015)

Essay, Conference Essay und Essayismus, Gdansk, PL
Webproject JeliNetz, Wien, AT

Jelinek both realizes and relativizes the essayistic mode of experimentation. She assembles excerpts from various reference texts, but she does not use the cut-up technique to make a hidden order visible or to hierarchize different voices and text parts within a framing. The essay demonstrates that both mass media and theoretical modes of writing have a tendency towards mythical rigidity. Pre-conscious ideas and desires accumulate and multiply in everyday language as well as in critical or theoretical modes of writing. Jelinek uses the aesthetic strategies of rupture and interruption to irritate binding patterns of perception and activate the reader.

The text was published in 2015 in the 32nd issue of the Polish journal Studia Germanica Gedanensia dedicated to the essay and on the research platform JeliNetz.