an austrian avant-garde ed. by Patrick Greaney and Sabine Zelger (review)

The volume an austrian avant-garde, edited by Patrick Greaney, who also translated the German literary texts into English and teaches at the German studies program of the University of Colorado Boulder, and Sabine Zelger, who teaches German pedagogy at the Hochschule Vienna/Krems, definitely offers a fresh view on its subject. By using the indefinite article "a," the two editors mark their "distance from attempts to identify […] with a single understanding of avant-garde practices" (16). This opens the field in several directions: in time, as the volume covers a period from the 1950s until today; in writers represented and in genre, by reaching far beyond prose; and in giving up the claim to be "on the forefront" of a new trend—usually considered inherent in the definition of avant-garde. By emphasizing the conflicting potential of the idea, the editors attempt to include a wider range of writers and emphasize the role exclusion plays in constituting the avant-garde. Given this, the title of the introduction, "Everything Can Also Be Called Something Else," can be read as a programmatic guideline for the arrangement of the texts. An extremely open conceptualization of avant-garde such as this and the lack of a clear definition of the term may disappoint some readers.

However, it is very important that a volume like this has been published: First of all, it gives insight into a field of Austrian literature that is definitely worth reading. Editing an English volume of texts that are often hermetic and challenging for every translator has to be recognized as very meritorious. The choice of texts integrated in the publication is also striking: Greaney and Zelger have chosen a feminist approach to the Austrian avant-garde that is usually connected with the Vienna group around Friedrich Achleitner, H. C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener. Aside from all the credit they deserve for their anti-conservative transcending of Austrian postwar literature, which was still being written within the frame of Nazi aesthetics, this group is also notorious for its misogynistic attitude toward the production of female writers and artists. Well-known remarks by Elfriede Gerstl, Friederike Mayröcker, VALIE EXPORT, and others bear witness that women were only accepted at their tables in the Viennese cafés as long they remained silent. By focusing on "Another Avant-garde," Greaney and Zelger shine a light exactly on Austrian female writers of the avant-garde who are still underrated. This statement concerns the generation of Ilse Aichinger, Gerstl, and Mayröcker as well as the following generation with Margret Kreidl and Ilse Kilic and the even younger one featuring Ann Cotten, Kathrin Röggla, and Lisa Spalt.

A volume on Austrian avant-garde with a feminist approach would certainly not be complete without a contribution by Nobel Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek. Her play After Nora (2013) completes a triumvirate of outspoken feminist texts. While Jelinek's play criticizes the capitalization of fashion, Margret Kreidl's "dramolett" (a term of Jelinek's) Ladies' Program (2005), denouncing the social pressure put on women, demonstrates the great poetic strength of this Viennese writer.

Although the editors emphasize their feminist approach, the volume is well balanced for texts written by female and by male writers: with the exception of Oswald Wiener, examples by all members of the Vienna Group can be found in the volume; texts penned by Heimrad Bäcker—whose journal and edition neue texte served as an important vehicle for publication by avantgarde writers in the 1970s and 1980s—and by Andreas Okopenko (one of the authors orbiting around the Vienna Group) are also integrated in the volume. Further, we find an excerpt from Herbert J. Wimmer's volume Membran reflecting on the loss of his long-term companion Elfriede Gerstl, with whom he co-authored books as well as their cards. An important discovery are the computer-generated...