In Search of a New Female Language: Elfriede Jelinek and Marlene Streeruwitz

Abstract

Two Austrian authors, Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Prize winner in 2004, and Marlene Streeruwitz “the unknown writer from the Danube”, as she was termed by the theatre magazine Theater heute, are the leading exponents of the search for a different literary language in which the female voice can express itself. While Elfriede Jelinek experiments with language by introducing changes in phraseology and constant references to philosophy and the world of music, Marlene Streeruwitz uses a broken, fragmented language with unstructured* Este trabajo se enmarca dentro del Proyecto de Investigación “Traducción y recepción del teatro postdramático en lengua alemana” (GV06/395), financiado por la Generalitat Valenciana. sentences and her texts are more like musical scores than traditional literary texts. The aim of this paper is to put forward a linguistic analysis of both authors’ texts in order to demonstrate how, with their particular use of language, they attempt to break out of the limitations imposed by a tradition based on stagnant social structures. They paint a picture of today’s society marked by violence and war in which the boundaries between victims and tyrants are blurred.