Spielformen der Literatur: Der moderne und der postmoderne Begriff des Spieles in den Werken von Thomas Bernhard, Heiner Müller und Botho Strauß by Renata Plaice (review)

Renata Plaice’s monograph Spielformen der Literatur analyzes modern and postmodern concepts of play in literary texts by Thomas Bernhard, Heiner Müller, and Botho Strauß. A revised version of a 2009 dissertation submitted at the National University of Ireland in Cork, the monograph approaches the works of Bernhard, Müller, and Strauß through the lens of philosophers and theorists from Friedrich Nietzsche to Giorgio Agamben in order to illustrate how the tensions between modernity and postmodernity continue in contemporary literature.

The opening chapter offers a broad summary of modern and postmodern theories of play. It begins with a summary of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition and then offers an overview of theories of play from Schiller, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Adorno, Derrida, Iser, and Agamben. The chapter thereby establishes a range of theories of play but also delineates between modernist, dialectical notions of play and the more open-ended, ateleological play of deconstruction and postmodernism. Chapter 2 discusses Bernhard’s plays Die Macht der Gewohnheit and Der Theatermacher and then turns to the novel Auslöschung. The chapter situates Bernhard’s oeuvre on the border between modernism and postmodernism: on the one hand, Bernhard’s characters express the ideals and ideas of modernism, but on the other, his works stage a playful repetition of the constant failure of modernist ideals. Chapter 3 positions Müller’s theater texts Die Hamletmaschine, Quartett, and Bildbeschreibung in the context of a postdialectical, posthistorical worldview in which the moment of transgressive play offers new possibilities. The fourth chapter then considers postmodern play in Strauß’s drama Kalldewey, Farce and the (re)emergence of modernist, metaphysical concerns in Strauß’s recent prose collection Mikado. Strauß’s work, the chapter argues, negates the categorical, diachronic separation between modernism and postmodernism. As a whole, the chapters on the different authors demonstrate the ways in which modern and postmodern philosophy and aesthetics are always already interrelated.

The above summary should be tempered by the following caveat: I had a very difficult time following the argument due to the convoluted writing style that persists throughout most of the book. The author repeatedly uses extended genitive constructions (for example: “der Spiegel der Zerstückelung des Subjekts des Spiels” 98), and the sentences are weighed down by an excessive use of abstract nouns and jargon. These and other stylistic issues undermine what could have been one of the book’s key contributions, namely its first chapter on theories of play from the late eighteenth century through the twentieth century. This initial chapter could have offered a much-needed lucid summary and comparison of these theories, but the writing remains so immersed in theoretical jargon that it will fail to make the theories comprehensible to anyone who is not already completely familiar with them.

The monograph also fails to clarify its specific contribution to scholarship on postmodern aesthetics in German literature, primarily because it only minimally considers scholarship in the field. Instead, the focus is directed toward theories of play and their relationship to the literary texts under consideration. Although the framework of play offers a different starting point, the approach nevertheless leads the argument into a discussion of the relationship between modern and postmodern aesthetics that was prevalent in scholarship on German literature from the 1980s and 1990s. A clear discussion of the monograph’s contribution to this body of work is conspicuously absent. Furthermore, the monograph never sufficiently explains its choice of authors and texts, other than the assertion that they illustrate “die Pluralität des Spielerischen in der Literatur” and show how modernity and postmodernity are not diachronically situated epochs but rather synchronous forms of thought (17).

The book’s main contribution comes in its consideration of individual literary texts. The chapters on Bernhard, Müller, and Strau...