Matteo Iacovella

Matteo Iacovella’s dissertation proposes a critical analysis of the work of Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016), with a special focus on the first thirty years of her oeuvre (1945-1976). The thesis divided into three sections. The first section presents the theoretical and critical framework of the project, with the aim of considering Aichinger’s writing as deeply linked to a political, historical, and existential dimension. In Ilse Aichinger’s writing, this relationship between ethical and aesthetical discourse in the literary text – as expressed in the compound word “poethics” (Weisberg 1992, Eskin 2000) – is associated with an attitude of skepticism and fundamental mistrust (Misstrauen) towards language and reality. The second section of the thesis presents the context in which Aichinger’s work originates. Beginning with her very first programmatic texts, published in the periodical «Plan» in 1946, it is also possible to reflect on the conditions of the difficult and precarious “rebirth” of the editorial and cultural scene in post-war Vienna. The third section focuses on Aichinger’s literary texts and her relationship with language. Where possible, the published work has been integrated with notes, documents, and archival traces in the author’s Nachlass in Marbach am Neckar, as well as with recently published materials. The proposed analyses follow three movements of writing: questioning, researching, reducing (interrogare, ricercare, ridurre). These modes, which permeate Aichinger’s texts beyond any possible periodization, have been associated with three literary forms: the novel Die größere Hoffnung, in which the children’s questions to the adults reveal the ethical dilemmas underneath Aichinger’s writing; the radio play, through which Aichinger experiments with the possibilities and the limits of language, sound, and silence; the Prosagedicht, a hybrid form which can be seen as the concrete realization of a gradual poetics of subtraction, as well as the point of arrival of Aichinger’s skepticism – as in her book Schlechte Wörter (1976).