Living with Art: Repositioning the late works of Thomas Bernhard

This study re-evaluates and repositions the late writings of the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard (1931-89). Over thirty years after his death, Bernhard is widely considered to be a writer of international relevance. He is renowned for his bleak portrayals of modern society, his scandalous critiques of his homeland, and his infectious and much-imitated linguistic style. But there is another side to Bernhard—one which existing analyses of his domestic controversies and foreign fanbases are yet to examine fully. In this study, I argue that Bernhard’s late prose and dramatic works are centrally concerned with the relationship between art and social living. He explores forms of learning from art, and how engaging with art can affect ways of behaving towards others and oneself. This study resituates Bernhard’s late works outside of their more conventional domestic contexts to bring these aspects of his writings more clearly into focus. Starting from a reconsideration of what it means to read Bernhard as world literature, I reposition the author alongside three Anglophone points of comparison: Angela Carter, Timberlake Wertenbaker, and J. M. Coetzee. These authors, who are yet to be compared with Bernhard in scholarship, allow me to re-evaluate his late prose and dramatic works beyond their local controversies in 1980s Austria; they help me to illuminate the humanity and self-awareness of a writer more commonly associated with unremitting negativity; and they enable me to investigate what Bernhard’s late works still have to say about art, decades on from his cultural moment. Reimagining Bernhard beyond his familiar intertexts, his existing international reception, and his own self-staging, this study will be of interest to scholars of Bernhard, late twentieth-century literature, and comparative literature more generally.