Original scientific paper
Marginalization and Modernity. Aloofness and Asymmetry in the Work of Joseph Roth
Wolfgang Müller-Funk
; Universität Wien
Abstract
With the exception of the early story Der Vorzugsschüler (1915/16), the prose work of Joseph Roth covers a period of about one and a half decades: it ranges from 1923, the year when his first novel Das Spinnennetz was published in Wiener Arbeiterzeitung (as a book, it was published posthumously), to 1939, the year when his short novel Die Legende vom Heiligen Trinker was published posthumously in Amsterdam by Allert de Lange. Both 1923 and 1939 mark a crisis. It was during this period that the extremely successful journalist and essayist Joseph Roth presented a prose opus the significance of which continues to this day and which is characterized by an astonishing diversity but at the same time held together by intricate coherence. – In his analysis of the novels Das Spinnennetz (1923), Die Rebellion (1924) and Zipper und sein Vater (1928), the author focuses primarily on Roth's representation of marginalized persons: conceived as a collective term comprising aspects like peripheral position, dysfunctionality, meaninglessness, and powerlessness, the concept of marginality proves to be an exceptionally useful instrument for analyzing works whose character constellation is largely comprised of mutilated and traumatized figures.
Keywords
postimperial narratives; marginalization; modernity; Joseph Roth; narrating marginality
Hrčak ID:
244992
URI
Publication date:
17.10.2020.
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