Article:

Vor-Schriften? Regieanweisungen als (Teil von) Notationen in Elfriede Jelineks Theatertexten.

The article follows the attempt to negotiate “stage directions” in Elfriede Jelinek’s theater texts as “scenic passages”. These take on mediating or translating functions between the persona staged as “author” and the institution of theater on the one hand, and between text and performance on the other. To elaborate the modes of operation of Jelinek’s “scenic passages,” the article resorts to a research perspective directed from the field of “notation.” The basic assumption is that such a focus makes it possible to foreground translation processes between writing, voices, and sounds, as well as the interconnected problematics of the limitation and potency of notation in their socio-political, medial, and historical contexts. For this purpose, metaphors (echo-chamber, score, poly- and heterophony), which often serve to describe Jelinek’s texts, are first brought into view. Jelinek’s textual procedures are shown to be a practice of translation between notation and sound phenomena, which negotiates ruptures in medial and cultural transmission. In this sense, the paper argues for privileging the heterophonic in descriptive language in order to conceptually catch up with Jelinek’s practice of translation. In the subsequent section, modulations of “scenic passages” in Jelinek’s plays are examined as “small forms” in order to stimulate a differentiation of the complex medial operations of her “notating” textual procedures.