Discussion Group: Cosmology, Ecology, Memory: New Comparative Perspectives on Ingeborg Bachmann
This roundtable session explores what comparative literature can bring to the study of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973). Drawing together our individual research approaches, which are informed by cosmology, ecology, and memory respectively, we will discuss new ways of situating Bachmann’s work, highlighting its at-times staggering ambition, its ability to reach across multiple languages and traditions, and its generation of prolific transnational legacies.
Roberto Interdonato will examine how the works of Bachmann, alongside those of Italian writer Anna Maria Ortese (1914–1998), reflect the distinctly modern experience of ‘losing oneself’ in response to Western societal developments and historical traumas on a cosmological level. In particular, their novels Malina (1971) and Il porto di Toledo ([The Harbour of Toledo], 1975), while reconnecting images of war, extermination camps, poverty, and suffering with the brutal violence of Nazi fascism and its aftermath, juxtapose spatial metaphors of escape, directing the reader’s gaze toward the cosmos, celestial bodies, or imagined earthly spaces that represent a reconnection with the natural, rather than the civil, order.
While Bachmann is by no means a ‘nature writer’, Dr. Conor Brennan will argue that her work can nonetheless be read through an ecological lens. The texts of her unfinished novel cycle Todesarten [Ways of Dying] – conceived as ‘eine einzige große Studie aller möglichen Todesarten’ [a single great study of all possible ways of dying] – connect and compare countless forms and victims of violence, including recurring images of suffering animals, consumption, and meat. While the animals of Todesarten are usually seen as symbolic stand-ins and points of identification for the novels’ female protagonists, it will be argued that the novel cycle’s sheer ambition should lead us to include animals and the more-than-human world among the real subjects of Bachmann’s writing.
Finally, Hannah Scheithauer will explore how Bachmann’s writings provide fertile ground for testing recent approaches in cultural memory studies – a field in which the very gesture of comparison has come under increasing critical scrutiny. She will focus on the unfinished novel Das Buch Franza [The Book of Franza], which, as part of the Todesarten project, explores a far-reaching alignment of post-Holocaust, postcolonial, and gendered memories of violence. This highly synthetic view of history, however, ends by causing political and ethical problems, which eventually necessitate the elaboration of a more carefully differentiated relationship with the past.
Roberto Interdonato is a D.Phil. Candidate in German and Italian at St. John’s College, Oxford. Dr. Conor Brennan is a Departmental Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford. Hannah Scheithauer is a D.Phil. Candidate in French and German at The Queen’s College and a Lecturer in French at St. John’s College, Oxford.
