From Purkersdorf to Peking: Tourism and Globalization in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina and Elfriede Jelinek’s Gier

Abstract

Beginning with an off-color and seemingly off-topic parenthetical joke near the conclusion of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Gier (2000), this article reads that book beside a draft fragment of Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 novel Malina called “Besichtigung einer alten Stadt” in order to reveal how both authors simultaneously resist but neverthe-less participate in international literary tourism relating to their native Austria. Both authors grapple with what it means to write of a national home in an apparently postnational era, but whereas Bachmann’s work is still marked by a nostalgia for the inherently transnational Austro-Hungarian Empire, Jelinek comes to understand the postnational as the very occasion for the construction of national identity.