Cold War Discourses - Book

The present study Cold War Discourses. A Different Austrian Post-War Literature (Diskurse des Kalten Krieges. Eine andere österreichische Nachkriegsliteratur) is based on the FWF-project Cold War Discourses. Political Configurations and Their Contexts in Austrian Literature Between 1945 And 1966 which was led by Günther Stocker at the German Department of the University of Vienna. Focusing on one of the defining sociopolitical phenomenon of the era, the Cold War, the publication is the first systematic study on this complex of themes, as it approaches an aspect of Austrian literary and cultural history which, so far, has received only little attention. Although the study has ties to the international research in Contemporary History, its subject and methodological approach make it a genuine literary study. Referring to (theoretical aspects of) New Historicism, it is especially interested in the specific literary strategies of processing and representation of Cold War contemporary political discourse. The study describes manners of speaking, specific rhetorical figures and thought patterns essential in literary discourses of the Cold War and puts them into national as well as international contexts. The literary texts refer to the cultural field that generated them and so the exchange processes between literary and non-literary texts are analysed as well as specific metaphors, allegories and concepts. Based on more than 50, mostly unknown and newly discovered texts of Austrian post-war literature, the study presents its findings in 15 chapters, which are grouped on different levels - from discursive constellations and narratives to images and thematic clusters. The chapters address in detail the imagination and construction of borders (chapter 1), travels behind the Iron Curtain (chapter 2) and narratives that modernise William Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet by referencing the geopolitical conflicts of the period. Besides phenomena such as totalitarianism (chapter 4), critique of materialism and the mass (chapter 5) the study also sets out scenarios of the Gulag (chapter 6) and the continuity of National Socialism in the light of the Cold War (chapter 7). Further aspects that are discussed include, the anticipated nuclear threat (chapter 8), proxy wars in the form of espionage (chapter 9) and the omnipresent concepts of hostility and disease (chapter 10), as well as rhetoric (chapter 11) and artistic fronts (chapter 12) in a divided world. The final chapters analyse phenomena of conversion (chapter 13), images of Austria during the Cold War (chapter 14) and abduction (chapter 15). The many examples present not only fresh and unknown material but more importantly show that the described phenomena are not singular events but part of recurrent discourse patterns.