Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Despite the consistency and regularity of Bachmann’s critique of journalists and journalistic content, there has been to date no dedicated study of her portrayal of the journalistic media in individual works or her work as a whole. This dissertation addresses this gap in Bachmann studies by undertaking a detailed and comprehensive analysis of Bachmann’s literary portrayal of the journalistic media from the time she first came into the literary spotlight in the early 1950s until her 1972 Simultan collection, the last work to be published in her lifetime. The primary focus of this dissertation is a close textual analysis of literary works in which Bachmann makes significant references to journalists and journalism, examining these references closely in the context of existing scholarly analyses. In a systematic analysis of each literary genre that Bachmann tackled—poetry, radio plays, short prose and novels—this study demonstrates that Bachmann’s critique of journalists and journalism recurs with notable frequency and consistency throughout her work from 1952 onwards. The detailed analyses show that Bachmann’s critique of the “fourth estate” ranges from the mildly critical to the vitriolic, and constantly returns to a core set of concerns about the misrepresentations perpetrated by the journalistic media. The negativity of Bachmann’s critique is, however, almost always offset (and even undercut) by evidence that the journalistic media are not always successful in their (according to Bachmann’s portrayal) deceitful and destructive practices. This results in the oxymoron encapsulated in a literal interpretation of Ich’s declaration in Malina that the press is “ein unglaublicher Betrug”: while Bachmann does her utmost to depict the press as “Betrug”, she simultaneously reveals to us that it is also “unglaublich” in the sense of “unglaubhaft”. What also emerges from this study is that Bachmann’s literary critique of the journalistic media as both deceptive and inherently destructive is often counterbalanced by a more positive and contrary element that points towards where and how we might find the truth that the journalistic media do not and cannot convey.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/269553 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Nittel, Gisela |
| Publisher | University of Sydney., Department of Germanic Studies |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | The author retains copyright of this thesis., http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/copyright.html |
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