in English The aim of this diploma thesis is to compare novels by Elfriede Jelinek, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Thomas Bernhard on the grounds of each authors' different understanding of language and its limits. The first part is concerned with what I found typical of the novels: Bachmann's Malina (1971) describes and represents the search for (non-violent) language, Jelinek's The Piano Teacher (1983) makes use of violent language as a weapon against violence, and Bernhard's novels problematize the question of truth and objectivity by means of first-person narrators and nested testimonies. The second part uses Roman Jakobson's theory of language as a combination of metaphor and metonymy and shows the ways in which novels can emphasize one or the other pole and what it tells about the language as a whole. Especially in the case of the texts by Bachmann and Jelinek, the important methodological models for his paper are feminist theories: theories of language and means of expression (Drucilla Cornell, John Berger), theories of cultural conditionality of the body (Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young) and feminist texts which connect body and language (Beatrice Hanssen). On the contrary, in the novels and for their analysis, the approaches that allow for gender essentialism (Luce Irigaray) prove to be...