Artur Sartori Kon

The work aims at investigating the theatrical work of Elfriede Jelinek – an Austrian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 but is still little known in Brazil – in order to shed light on the meaning of writing for the theater today, given the autonomy that the scene has developed towards drama since the mid-twentieth century. Relating, in the dialectic line of Adorno, Szondi, Hans-Thies Lehmann and Christoph Menke, formal innovations developed by the author's plays to the historical and social conditions that she confronts, our study focuses on four points of articulation. First, the connection between a certain reiteration of the dramatic genre in Jelinek and what philosopher Judith Butler called “the dramatic reiteration of gender”, that is, the way in which what is understood as feminine is constructed by the repetition of "performative" behaviors. Second, the exploration of a choral enunciation, surpassing the dramatic category of the character, as a way of proposing a collective and indeterminate subjectivity beyond a recrudescent European xenophobia’s fixation on identity. Third, the reconfiguration in the 21st century of old concerns of political theater, such as the representation of the capitalist system and the reflection on the forces that oppose it, in a post-Brechtian playwriting which departs from the innovations of the epic-dialectic theater in order to seek other forms, less linked to understanding and a pedagogical intention towards the viewer: “an art of non-understanding”. Finally, the limitation and failure of the theatrical phenomenon in face of great historical catastrophes (the closure of representation in itself in a post-avant-garde period) convert into a “politics of the impossible” associated with a post-dramatic return of tragedy, now – in the wake of Samuel Beckett and Heiner Müller – inseparable from comedy, producing the bitter laugh characteristic of the author’s theater. An attached volume also includes our translations of all analyzed plays, as well as some speeches and essays by Jelinek on writing and theater.