Zugl.: Düsseldorf, Univ., Diss., 2005

Ingeborg Bachmann’s recurrent references to the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya have frequently been noted, but have so far never been investigated. After outlining, in chapter one, Bachmann’s references to Goya in her thesis on Wittgenstein as well as in the Franza-Fragment and in her only novel Malina, this thesis sets out to highlight the text-image relation between Bachmann’s novel Malina and Goya’s series of murals which are known as the so called „Black Paintings“. Chapter two focuses on the importance of intertextuality and intermediality in Bachmann’s novel and the importance of quotation for the female narrator, who relies on intertextual and intermedial references to express her traumatic experiences. After an introduction into the aesthetics of Goya, in chapter three, chapters four and five examine the text-image relation between Goya’s painting El Perro Semihundido and the first chapter in Bachmann’s novel. The double perspective contained in El Perro, of the subjective expression of the dog’s longing for rescue and the objective futility of this hope as expressed by the dog’s positioning against the abstract background setting, is transferred onto the female narrator and her longing to be rescued through love. Chapter five especially focuses on the (problematic) semantic shifts which occur in the course of this transformation from an abstract representation in the painting to the depiction of concrete and personalized experiences in the text. Chapter six investigates the correlations between Bachmann’s dream chapter and the aesthetics of Goya’s murals, and asks to what extent Bachmann succeeds in transferring the main motifs in Goya’s images into literary form. Chapter seven explores the similarities and media-specific differences in the strategies deployed for depicting madness, violence and destruction in Bachmann’s text and in Goya’s murals and his series of prints on the Desasters of War. Bachmann’s novel Malina shows an extraordinary richness in intertextual and intermedial references. Analysing the explicit as well as implicit references to Goya’s late works in the novel this thesis addresses one area on Ingeborg Bachmann which has not been researched in detail so far.

This thesis demonstrates the aesthetic impact of crisis on Ingeborg Bachmann's late verse and prose. It examines poetic drafts written during a period of personal breakdown in the 1960s, which have largely been received as documents of personal suffering, and identifies these texts as a radical stage of writing that was to prove formally significant for Bachmann's development of the prose "Todesarten"-Projekt. This thesis draws on the new material made available with the publication of these poetic drafts to chart the genesis of Bachmann's acclaimed late oeuvre. By selecting and grouping lyric fragments, the thesis defines recurrent features in this verse and accounts for the texts as a body of writing that forms a radical, yet undocumented, part of this oeuvre. In terms of both their form and of their content, the fragmentary drafts are shown to reflect new engagement with aspects of experience conventionally excluded from High Art. In light of Bachmann's growing preoccupation with the need for aesthetic engagement in the post-war era, close readings reveal how she set about taking her subjective suffering as a basis for a critique of the social order. The thesis outlines how, during the 1960s, Bachmann pioneered a symptomatic expressive mode that - in the disrupted form of the writing - found an indirect means of manifesting the wider origins of subjective disturbance. The ambiguous aesthetic status of these poetic drafts, which were never finished by Bachmann, is related to an inability to establish structural distance from crisis in lyric form. Building on its readings of the poetic drafts, the thesis traces Bachmann's prose experimentation with the same motifs. It identifies how, ultimately, the prose medium enabled the author to resolve problems of aesthetic form raised in the verse. Parallels with the work of other writers and thinkers illuminate the development of a reflexive mode where sophisticated aesthetic strategies enable the oblique expression of cultural critique.