Ernst Jandl and the run-down languages

The starting point of our project is the so-called "heruntergekommene Sprache" (run-down language) which the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) developed during the 70s, following the patterns of immigrants` use of German. We want to show that this language neither follows nor can be described by rules, as literary interpretation has tried to do in the past. For us, run-down language is a form of free expression. It works as a language game in the sense that Wittgenstein uses the term. Every speaker can easily use this language by inventing it continuously: It is infinite, irregular, pre-conscious, spontaneous, and humorous. Jandl`s "run-down language" covers various manifestations of decline: regarding the body, this means aging and illness, regarding the mind, it means de-pression. Regarding the social status of the author, it means becoming popular. For all these reasons, Jandl`s language is closely related to several poetic fields of expression that have not been considered so far: the poetry of (second-generation) immigrants (Feridun Zaimoglu, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Yoko Tawada, etc.), the language and poetry of mentally ill and mentally handicapped people (Adolf Wölfli, Ernst Herbeck, the artists of Gugging), the use of dialects (the so called Wiener Gruppe), and the realm of infantile language and consciousness (H. C. Artmann, Christian Loidl, Elfriede Jelinek). With this project we intend to investigate the poetic, social, and cultural implications of the relations between these different fields. Finally, this comparative study aims at developing a new general rhetoric of free expression.

The research project "Ernst Jandl und die heruntergekommenen Sprachen" focusses on Jandl`s (1925-2000) poems written in a so called "deteriorated language" in the mid 1970s. The language superficially resembles the way of speaking of foreign workers when they haven`t been instructed to the basic rules of correct German. Jandl though didn`t evolve this alienated poetic form just to confess his empathy for the neglected parts of society but to express his own personal experience with psychic and aesthetic states of crisis and loss of the ability to speak and write. The poject tries to show that this seemingly ephemere outburst of poetic self destruction turns out to be a crucial point in his oeuvre. Taking the "deteriorated language" as Jandl`s hidden central poetic program, his work can be revisited and newly defined as a continuous dealing with the inherent connection between language and experience. Starting from his early works Jandl establishes an almost uncountable variety of forms which generally build up a caleidoscopical picture of living and writing in an existential state of deep alienation. Especially in this point, Jandl`s work seems to be paradigmatically connected to the whole movement of modern and experimental poetry in post war Europe.