The Nihilism of Thomas Bernhard
The Nihilism of Thomas Bernhard

Author: Martin

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-12-18

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 9004654666

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This study examines the nihilistic basis of Bernhard's writing, and traces developments in the author's nihilistic stance throughout his career. In the first period of his prose fiction (1963-1975), nihilism is reluctantly accepted by Bernhard's fictional characters as a necessary response to a world perceived as meaningless. Various possible sources of transcendence are explored, and rejected. The autobiographical texts (1975-1982) then represent a sustained attempt by the author himself to transcend his own essentially nihilistic state. The apparent success of this attempt is quickly revealed to be illusory in the prose fiction of the second period (1978-1986), and it becomes apparent that nihilism is a no less necessary response to Austrian social reality than to the (more purely) personal problems which first motivated Bernhard's writing.

The Nihilism of Thomas Bernhard
The Nihilism of Thomas Bernhard

Author: Charles W. Martin

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9789051838862

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This study examines the nihilistic basis of Bernhard's writing, and traces developments in the author's nihilistic stance throughout his career. In the first period of his prose fiction (1963-1975), nihilism is reluctantly accepted by Bernhard's fictional characters as a necessary response to a world perceived as meaningless. Various possible sources of transcendence are explored, and rejected. The autobiographical texts (1975-1982) then represent a sustained attempt by the author himself to transcend his own essentially nihilistic state. The apparent success of this attempt is quickly revealed to be illusory in the prose fiction of the second period (1978-1986), and it becomes apparent that nihilism is a no less necessary response to Austrian social reality than to the (more purely) personal problems which first motivated Bernhard's writing.

The Loser
The Loser

Author: Thomas Bernhard

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2010-11-10

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0307773469

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Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is incomparably his own.One of Bernhard's most acclaimed novels, The Loser centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould's incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other-- the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator-- has retreated into obscurity. Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, The Loser is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.

Yes
Yes

Author: Thomas Bernhard

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1992-11

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 9780226043906

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The narrator, a scientist working on antibodies and suffering from emotional and mental illness, meets a Persian woman, the companion of a Swiss engineer, at an office in rural Austria. For the scientist, his endless talks with the strange Asian woman mean release from his condition, but for the Persian woman, as her own circumstances deteriorate, there is only one answer. "Thomas Bernhard was one of the few major writers of the second half of this century."—Gabriel Josipovici, Independent "With his death, European letters lost one of its most perceptive, uncompromising voices since the war."—Spectator Widely acclaimed as a novelist, playwright, and poet, Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) won many of the most prestigious literary prizes of Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Brüchner prizes, and Le Prix Séguier.

Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives
Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives

Author: Olaf Berwald

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1501351532

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In his prose fiction, memoirs, poetry, and drama, Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989)--one of the 20th century's most uniquely gifted writers--created a new and radical style, seemingly out of thin air. His books never “tell a story” in the received sense. Instead, he rages on the page, he rants and spews vitriol about the moral failures of his homeland, Austria, in the long amnesiac aftermath of the Second World War. Yet this furious prose, seemingly shapeless but composed with unparalleled musicality, and taxing by conventional standards, has been powerfully echoed in many writers since Bernhard's death in 1989. These explorers have found in Bernhard's singular accomplishment new paths for the expression of life and truth. Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives examines the international mobilization of Bernhard's style. Writers in Italian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, English, and French have succeeded in making Bernhard's Austrian vision an international vision. This book tells that story.

Old Masters
Old Masters

Author: Thomas Bernhard

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2010-05-06

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 0141192712

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In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has been summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. While Reger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher--who fears Reger's plans to kill himself--gives us a portrait of the musicologist: his wisdom, his devotion to his wife, and his love-hate relationship with art. With characteristically acerbic wit, Bernhard exposes the pretensions and aspirations of humanity in a novel at once pessimistic and strangely exhilarating. Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel.--Robert Craft, New York Review of Books. Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction. --George Steiner

Extinction
Extinction

Author: Thomas Bernhard

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2013-08-21

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0307833607

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From the late Thomas Bernhard, arguably Austria's most influential novelist of the postwar period, and one of the greatest artists in all twentieth-century literature in the German language, his magnum opus. Extinction, Bernhard's last work of fiction, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau, the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family. Murau lives in Rome in self-imposed exile from his family, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends. On returning from his sister's wedding to the "wine-cork manufacturer" on the family estate of Wolfsegg, having resolved never to go home again, Murau receives a telegram informing him of the death of his parents and brother in a car crash. Not only must he now go back, he must do so as the master of Wolfsegg. And he must decide its fate. Divided into two halves, Extinction explores Murau's rush of memories of Wolfsegg as he stands at his Roman window considering the fateful telegram, in counterpoint to his return to Wolfsegg and the preparations for the funeral itself. Written in the seamless style for which Bernhard became famous, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius. It is his summing-up against Austria's treacherous past and -- in unprecedented fashion -- a revelation of his own incredibly complex personality, of his relationship with the world in which he lived, and the one he left behind. A literary event of the first magnitude.

Three-part Inventions
Three-part Inventions

Author: Thomas Cousineau

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9780874130188

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This critical survey of Thomas Bernhard's novels highlights a recurring theme of 'three' in Bernard's work. Thomas J. Cousineau argues that each of Bernhard's novels, although firmly anchored in Austrian history, emerges from an archetypal story involving three figures: protagonist, scapegoat and author.

Woodcutters
Woodcutters

Author: Thomas Bernhard

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2013-01-23

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 0307833550

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Fiercely observed, often hilarious, and “reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg” (The New York Times Book Review), this exquisitely controversial novel was initially banned in its author’s homeland. A searing portrayal of Vienna’s bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an ‘artistic dinner’ hosted by a composer and his society wife—a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent but frenzied tirade against these former friends, most of whom have been brought together by Joana, a woman they buried earlier that day. Reflections on Joana’s life and suicide are mixed with these denunciations until the famous actor arrives, bringing an explosive end to the evening that even the writer could not have seen coming.

Family Secrets and the Contemporary German Novel
Family Secrets and the Contemporary German Novel

Author: Elizabeth Snyder Hook

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 157113185X

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Central to the discussions of each novel are questions of guilt, cultural identity, and atonement, and of the relocation of these ultimately unresolvable issues from the larger national and political arena to the realm of intimate relationships between parents and children."--BOOK JACKET.