Catastrophic Irony and the Poetics of Fragmentedness in the Texts of Reinhardt Jirgl

Abstract

This article identifies features of Reinhard Jirgl’s poetics based on the principles of textual disruption, anagrammatic aesthetics, and performativity. A distinctive feature of Reinhardt Jirgl’s idiostyle are discontinuities and violations of narrative, fragmentedness, overlapping discourses, refusal of narrative coherence, stratification and (re)combining of storylines. The events that took place in Germany before and after 1989/90 are represented in the writer’s works as a chronicle of catastrophes. Within the framework of the concept of catastrophic irony, Berlin becomes a specfic conceptual-semiotic space, generating additional meanings. The main means of realization of catastrophic irony are aesthetic radicalism, dissonance between appearance and truth, virtualization of political processes, communicative violations and paradoxes, dismantling, and duality. On the material of the novels “Abschied von den Feinden”, “Hundsnächte”, “Abtrünnig: Roman aus der nervösen Zeit” the author considers particulars of experimental writing, which helps generating new meanings of social life.