An Exploration of Materiality in Josef Winkler’s Narrative Structures

Abstract

Josef Winkler’s work is defined by iterations of events from his childhood, most of them in the context of Austrian provincialism, Catholicism, and their patriarchal structures of dominance. In each of his narratives, memories are rehearsed and retold with increasing semantic precision, every time more complicated through intermedial references to sound, smell, and cinematic imagery. In his pursuit of the aesthetics of form and genre, Winkler consciously inserts material objects that become crucial elements in his recollections of the past. This dissertation argues that common household items, sacred relics, or brand items constitute familiar categories of objects that are presented, framed, and placed within the text, where they function as an essential part of narrative structure. While they re-affirm apparently ossified systems of belief, they also break them down. Everytime the object or thing re-occurs, it has changed and thereby changes everything around it. While he fetishizes and manipulates things, in particular those associated with the act of writing, he exposes both their power and their powerlessness with irony and satire. As objects in a system of exchange, they stand in as autobiographical as well as cultural signifiers and articulate a distinct discourse about a particularly ambiguous and ambivalent “semiotic order of things.”