Speaker: Martin Lindner (Oxford)
It has been a dominant historiographic narrative that nationalist and colonialist thinking in late 19th-century Austria-Hungary overwhelmingly pervaded cultural and political life, conceptualizing its diverse population as being divided along binary, and growingly exclusive, categories of identity and difference. This not least characterized Germanophone discourse in Central Europe, propagating ideas about cultural superiority, for example over the empire’s Slavic-language speakers, in a way that often merged tropes of inner-European difference and exoticist imagery of European colonialism overseas.
Inspired by recent revisions in Habsburg historiography, however, this lecture will discuss the often formally creative ways in which some German-language writers in Austria-Hungary challenged the divisive rhetoric of their times, by creating alternative narrative languages that foregrounded sameness and commonality. Taking the prose fiction of Moravian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) as primary example for exploring these so far neglected ‘aesthetics of sameness’, it will demonstrate how the writer challenged nationalist ideas of separation by formally rendering ambiguous markers of national, ethnic, and linguistic belonging.
Methodologically, the lecture has two aims: to demonstrate the value of a distinctively narratological approach for investigating colonialist and ethno-national identity discourses and counter-discourses as constructed cultural narratives, and secondly, to show how thinking about similarity and sameness in the complex context of multiethnic Austria-Hungary can help overcome binary identity-alterity conceptions that still characterize narrative postcolonial research in other fields of study.
Martin Lindner is an AHRC- and Clarendon-funded doctoral student at Brasenose College, Oxford.
Attendance free. All are welcome to attend, in person or online via Zoom. Advance online registration is essential, please select appropriate ticket when booking.