Att transferera en roman. Die Klavierspielerin mellan det österrikiska, tyska och svenska kritikerfältet

Transferring a Novel. The Piano Teacher between the Austrian, German, and Swedish fields of literary criticism (Att transferera en roman. Die Klavierspielerin mellan det österrikiska, tyska och svenska kritikerfältet) The purpose of the essay is to examine the literary transfer of Elfriede Jelinek’s commercial breakthrough novel The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin, 1983) between Austria, Germany, and Sweden. The phenomenon of literary transfer essentially feeds on powerful mechanisms of literary success — specifically, the way status (literary value) and attention (economic value and media capital) are created. The study seeks to contribute to the understanding of transna­tional literary transfer by exploring two dimensions: (1) the relations between fields of cultural production, and (2) the role of individual gatekeepers within the fields. The main focus is on literary criticism in the general and specialized press. The study also touches on the marketing strategies of the publishing houses and the media coverage of Jelinek in interviews. The liter­ary criticism is roughly ordered along the axis of autonomous — commercial/heteronymous. The normative and conceptual systems of the national fields of literary criticism are examined and compared. The national fields of literary criticism show many structural similarities, but also display their own separate and consistent value and norm systems. The autonomous or specialized criticism to some extent addresses the textual functions and literary methods of Jelinek’s novel. Swedish critics in the daily press display a greater interest in textual and rhe­torical devices than their German-speaking counterparts, which may be linked to the contem­porary Swedish discussion of post-structuralism and language awareness. Notable deviating voices draw on literary or media capital as well as on critical capital. Such ‘hybrids’, amassing a substantial amount of literary capital, use their positions as gatekeepers to promote Jelinek’s text