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Abstract
This dissertation is a comparative study which traces the development of a distinctive aesthetics in the late twentieth century novels of the Austrian writer, Christoph Ransmayr. The three novels, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, Die letzte Welt and Morbus Kitahara, while quite different in terms of spatial and temporal orientation, share several key features which contribute to the operation of what I define and examine as the aesthetics of humility in the texts. These recurrent thematic, structural and symbolic elements in the three novels relate to the texts’ critique of scientific modernity, their privileging of myth (both thematically and stylistically), the representation of nature and the texts’ readings of apocalypse and transformation.
The theory of myth developed by Hans Blumenberg in Arbeit am Mythos provides an interpretative framework to explain the re-emergence of myth as a contemporary response to the “absolutism of reality” which the systems and technologies of scientific modernity have produced in the twentieth century. The first part of this thesis examines the representation in individual novels of the collapse and breakdown of selected metanarratives of modernity. The second part consists of an examination of three core myths which function to restructure the narrative of human existence in each novel.
This thesis determines that the development of the aesthetics of humility in Ransmayr's novels is dependent on the reader's recognition of the changed perspective and the changed perception which characters in each novel experience. To different extents the characters in each novel abandon a rational perception of reality. The aesthetics of reality acknowledges a textual consciousness and privileging of the projected Other of reason; nature, myth, fantasy, irrationality and barbarity. The human subject no longer occupies the privileged central position in humanist cosmology. Displaced from the centre to the periphery of civilization, the human subject is also represented as having lost control of its physical and psychical environment. Human pretensions to power and influence over itself and its environment are negated in the texts’ revelation of the transience of life. This loss of status and place is related on a seemingly moral level to the novels’ representation of the human potential for brutality and cruelty. The ultimate disappearance of the human subject in each novel is related to the subject's gradual objectification in the text and the final dissolution of its identity.