Monograph Reinhard Priessnitz: "vierundvierzig gedichte"

Reinhard Priessnitz vierundvierzig gedichte (1978) is a key work of Literary Modernism, uniquely rich and complex in its reflection on both tradition and avant-garde movements alike. For Priessnitz, producing a poetic text no longer meant to individualize a genre, a tradition, a personal style or a notion of poetic speaking, but something much more fundamental: Each and every text looks for its own concept of text and tests it; the ideas of what language, material, consciousness, writing poetry, or the phenomenon, are supposed to be, are put at stake in every single case anew. Priessnitz brought about a clash of ideals, forms of composition, concepts and modes of speaking which were at distant from each other and often mutually exclusive, such as Concrete Poetry and Elaborate Diction; stanza and hypermodern critique of knowledge; the principle of contingency and the hit song. It was as if opposing concepts from the whole poetic universe were supposed to communicate with each other to make the whole of poetry present one more time in the form of paradoxical interconnections. To this day all of this, as well as the supremely differentiated role of parody, the quotation, and allusion contained in this concept still remains to be reviewed both analytically and historically. The analysis is to be carried out by means of the project applied for, which is scheduled to have a duration of 36 months. The aim is to write an extensive monograph on the work, which will send out innovative impulses both within the fields of the history and theory of the text, the Avantgarde and Modernism as a whole, but to current poetic writing also. Methodologically, it will further develop the approach used in the monograph written by the research assistant of the project on a work by the poet Ferdinand Schmatz, who was crucially inspired by Priessnitz. The evaluation of the literary remains of Priessnitz (ÖLA), which was for this monograph, will be continued. The cooperation partners who have made themselves available for the project are PD Klaus Kastberger PhD from the Literaturarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek as well as the editors of Priessnitz complete works, Ferdinand Schmatz PhD, Univ.-Prof. at the Universität für Angewandte Künste, Vienna, and Vienna University Assistant Thomas Eder MA PhD. At the end of the project, the results will be presented at a conference, where they will be discussed with the cooperation partners. The project is to be realized at the at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt. The research assistant with a post-doc contract will be Sebastian Kiefer PhD.

The project reconstructed the poetic thinking of the poetry book vierundvierzig gedichte ba Reinhard Prießjnitz (1945-1985), the cardinal work of the German- speaking neo-avant-garde, which was first published in 1978 and has so far resisted an analytical approach and thus also a historical classification. The results will be published in 2018 in a two volume book under the title Parodie und Totalität (Parody and totality) by Ritter-Verlag, Klagenfurt-Graz. Even in his youth, Priessnitz must have been certain that an emphatic, specifically poetic experience of text and meaning is only possible today if the individual textual concept is won and received from the manifold whole (the totality) of all essential modes of construction and speech and models of knowledge and the whole is of course that what embraces traditions and avant-garde. Priessnitz must then have recognized early on that this whole thing, at least for him, could no longer be experienced anew through closed systems, generalizable syntheses of ways of speaking, even less through closed complete works of art (such as James Joyce`s Ulysses). This totality of poetic experience can only be experienced in a sequence of highly reduced textual individuals, in each of which individual, specific ways of speaking and poetry concepts are staged and encounter completely different ones from other traditions or epochs for example concrete poetry encounter the sublime style; the narrative poem meets sound poetry; serial conceptions are combined with Renaissance forms, linguistic constellations are combined with spoofs of overpainting techniques of the visual arts. In extensive word-for-word readings, the book Parody and totality demonstrates how Priessnitz familiar traditional and advanced concepts of text, spirit and poetic language often parodistically reinstaged, let them collide with radically different conceptions of the poetic, to exemplify own, unrepeatable terms of the poetic in each case.