Description: "Explores and assesses the impact of Thomas Bernhard on writers around the world since his death in 1989"--
Brief description: Olaf Berwald is Chair of the Department of World Languages & Cultures and Professor of German at Kennesaw State University, USA. His most recent book is A Companion to the Works of Max Frisch (2013).
Review Quotes:
"A masterful set of essays on Bernhard's oeuvre .... Taken together, the eleven chapters of this book represent some of the best scholarship in English to date on Bernhard's remarkable impact on the world of postwar. ... There is too little space in a review like this to do justice to the breadth and quality of each of the other contributions. They represent literary scholars from across the major Western languages and have given us an essay collection that's truly useful: a sophisticated introduction to Bernhard's echo in Euro-American prose." --Journal of Austrian Studies
"More than three decades after his death, Thomas Bernhard has become an author of world literature. The resonance of Bernhard's voice in the works of numerous contemporaries far beyond the borders of Austria provides powerful testimony of this fact. In its exploration of this resonance, this remarkable volume makes a significant contribution to Bernhard criticism. Through their forays into Bernhard's international reception, the essays collected here open up new and extended vistas into the oeuvre of one of the foremost German-language writers of the 20th century." --Manfred Mittermayer, Director, Literaturarchiv Salzburg, University of Salzburg, Austria "In this insightful volume, we learn about the many ways in which authors across the globe have sought to emulate the great Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), from 'anticipatory plagiarism' to 'coinhabiting palimpsests.' Writers like Susan Sontag, W.G. Sebald, Geoff Dyer, Imre Kertész, Italo Calvino, and Horacio Castellanos Moya have turned to the brilliantly querulous Austrian to pursue their own political or aesthetic projects. Their takings have been devious, inclusive, maddening, profound, liberating. There are numerous avenues still to pursue with Bernhard, and this volume explores one fruitful possibility." --Fatima Naqvi, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, USA "This series of innovative reflections on and thoughtful engagements with Bernhard are an excellent addition to the field, especially to those studies of the author's work that explore its effects in a range of cultural and linguistic contexts." --Monatshefte