{"title":"Subverting Injurious Language: How Ilse Aichinger’s Narratological Strategies Liberate the Protagonist of “Spiegelgeschichte”","authors":"C. Scott","doi":"10.3138/SEMINAR.52.3.04","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the narratological and rhetorical features of Ilse Aichinger’s story of a botched abortion, “Spiegelgeschichte,” in order to highlight the challenges associated with putting female, bodily trauma into language. By focusing its analysis on the text’s second-person narration and imperative statements it makes an argument about the degree to which the protagonist is liberated from the oppressive conditions that lead to her death. Through her act of reflective storytelling the protagonist divides herself into narrated and narrating selves in order to experience herself as both subject and object and to fight back against her entrapment in a temporal chain of cause and effect. Reaching the limits of this reflective language, however, she must eventually turn to defiant silence in order to (re)establish herself as a unified subject and escape the injurious language that surrounds her.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"13 1","pages":"308 - 325"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2016-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3138/SEMINAR.52.3.04","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, GERMAN, DUTCH, SCANDINAVIAN","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Abstract:This essay examines the narratological and rhetorical features of Ilse Aichinger’s story of a botched abortion, “Spiegelgeschichte,” in order to highlight the challenges associated with putting female, bodily trauma into language. By focusing its analysis on the text’s second-person narration and imperative statements it makes an argument about the degree to which the protagonist is liberated from the oppressive conditions that lead to her death. Through her act of reflective storytelling the protagonist divides herself into narrated and narrating selves in order to experience herself as both subject and object and to fight back against her entrapment in a temporal chain of cause and effect. Reaching the limits of this reflective language, however, she must eventually turn to defiant silence in order to (re)establish herself as a unified subject and escape the injurious language that surrounds her.
期刊介绍：
The first issue of Seminar appeared in the Spring of 1965, sponsored jointly by the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German (CAUTG) and the German Section of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA). This collaborative sponsorship has continued to the present day, with the Journal essentially a Canadian scholarly journal, its Editors all Canadian, likewise its publisher, and managerial and editorial decisions taken by the Editor and/or the Canadian Editorial Committee,the Australasian Associate Editor being responsible for the selection of articles submitted from that area.
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