The Split Scene of Reading

Long prominent in Europe, the work of Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is only just beginning to receive the critical attention it deserves in the United States. Bachmann ranks with Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Peter Handke as one of the most distinguished Austrian prose writers of the twentieth century and is recognised, along with Gunter Eich and Paul Celan, as the most prominent German-language lyrical voice of the early post-World War 2 period. Golz exposes the intrinsic 'genderedness' of deconstruction. Taking the latter one step further than Derrida permits it to go, she shows that Bachmann inhabits the blindspot of Derridean deconstruction. This timely and innovative contribution to Bachmann studies is thus at the same time a significant and thought-provoking critique of Nietzsche, Kafka, and Derrida.