Abstract

This study of selected narratives by Adalbert Stifter articulates the literary theory of language underlying his prose. Exemplary readings demonstrate that his prose is informed by a poetics which strives to dissolve and eliminate the verbal articulation upon which it is itself dependent. ;The first part is concerned with the investigation of previously unnoticed motif-structures and their relevance to Stifter's poetics ;Because Stifter's poetics dissolve the stability of the traditional literary motif, the second part elaborates the paradoxical poetics of silence from the structural viewpoint of the two basic functions of language in Stifter: the descriptions and the dialogues . ;The last section returns to a thematic level of his texts, arguing that the speechless or speech-impaired children in Stifter's narratives are allegories of their poetics, and that allegorization is Stifter's unlikely way, not to resolve but to sustain the tension between speech and silence in writing . ;The readings and the complementary theoretical excursions are embedded in a framework of conflicting philosophies of silence by Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and others. Their critical discussion in the first chapter helps articulate and integrate into the process of reading the methodological problems inherent in discussing silence in literary texts