Spring 2021 volume of Journal of Austrian Studies U Nebraska press

 In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Perhaps no other German-language author has received as much public attention over the past year as Peter Handke. The bestowal of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature upon Handke unleashed a storm of controversy related to his writings and comments on the Yugoslavian Wars of the 1990s, making Handke—who in the meantime continues to write at his usual frenetic pace, producing a short novel (Das zweite Schwert) and a play (Zdeněk Adamec) in the brief time since the award—a living symbol of the still-simmering tensions in the Balkans and an object lesson in the debates over the relationship between literary or aesthetic value and political judgment. While these debates are essential to any overall assessment of Handke's work, they have perhaps made more difficult a literary evaluation of his achievements as a writer.

The volume under consideration, which appeared shortly before the Nobel Award and its accompanying flareup, attempts just such an evaluation by examining Handke not simply as a writer but also as a reader. Thorsten Carstensen has assembled nineteen essays, including contributions by recognized Handke scholars, on "Handke als Leser." They take up a variety of themes under this heading: the role of reading and of readers within Handke's oeuvre; his reception of other authors, from canonical figures such as Goethe and Stifter to less celebrated writers, as well as work in other media; the place of reading in his understanding of the task of the author and the role of literature; the ways in which reading and writing are mutually constitutive acts that also help constitute readers and writers; and reading as a vehicle for experiencing place and creating new forms of ethical community. Collected under four general headings ("Lesestrategien," "Anrufung der Autoritäten," "Variierende Wiederholungen," and—the loosest of the four groupings—"Das Buch der Welt"), the essays are preceded by Carstensen's own outstanding introduction, a small tour de force in its own right, which in a mere twenty-five pages or so manages to touch on all the themes mentioned [End Page 154] above while drawing on an impressive portion of Handke's massive body of work.

The volume as a whole is very nicely done. While every reader will have his or her favorite essays, there is not a single contribution that I would single out as poor. Some highlights for this reviewer were the contributions by Peter Strasser, who sets Handke's work in a broad philosophical context as a confrontation with problems of modernity, expressing admiration for Handke's ability to help us see the world with gratitude but also closing, in one of the volume's few critical notes, with a refusal to follow his critique to its full conclusion; Birthe Hoffmann's superb examination of Handke's relation to Grillparzer, focusing especially on the former's productive engagement with Der arme Spielmann; Chiheb Mehtelli's exploration of the similarities and differences between Handke's experience of the world and the Islamic mysticism of Ibn 'Arabī, certainly not a figure with whom I had been familiar; Anna Montané Forasté's delightful tour of Handke's literary engagement with Spain and his reception, in turn, by various contemporary Spanish thinkers and writers, also unfamiliar territory for me; Christoph Parry's thoughtful analysis of the role of landscapes in Handke's work, culminating in some cautious but insightful suggestions about the relationship between Handke's Landschaft spoetik and his problematic writings on Yugoslavia; and, finally, Carstensen's own comparison of the surprisingly similar efforts of Handke and the westschweizer poet Philippe Jaccottet to find a language that can "do the world justice" ("Das Schreiben verstehen Handke und Jaccottet [ … ] als emphatische Suche nach einer 'gerechten' Versprachlichung des Gesehenen," 332). It is hard to imagine a reader who will not find at least a few essays in this volume useful prompts to further thought and to further reading.

"Handke als Leser" might at first glance seem a narrow focus for a collection of essays covering nearly four hundred pages. Not so, however. Indeed, one of the volume's most valuable qualities—perhaps precisely because reading and writing play such central roles in Handke's work—is that...

Strasser on H

 Based on scholarly analysis, Peter Strasser’s view that Peter Handke’s aesthetic provocations act as a mask for "latent conservatism" is a recognized interpretation, particularly in discussions of Handke's shift from avant-garde to more traditional narratives. However, this view is not universally supported, as critics are deeply divided, with some focusing on his linguistic innovation while others focus on his politics

Peter Strasser’s book on Peter Handke, 

"Der Freudenstoff: Zu Handke eine Philosophie"(Material of Joy: A Philosophy on Handke), explores the Austrian writer's work through the lens of joy and aesthetic experience. 

Here are the key points regarding the book:

• The Theme of Joy: Contrary to readings that focus solely on the alienation or melancholy in Handke's work, Strasser argues that Handke's prose is deeply infused with a sense of joy, which he terms Freudenstoff.
• A "Love Letter" to the Work: Strasser approaches the subject with profound admiration, declaring in his introduction that he "fell in love" with Handke’s work twice—first through a naive fascination and later with a more mature, alert understanding.
• Critical Objectivity: Despite his admiration, Strasser argues that this intense engagement with the work actually allows for "critical objectivity" rather than blind adoration.
• Context: The book is a philosophical examination of Handke's literary output, aimed at understanding the emotional and philosophical substance of his writing. 

Does this overview help you understand the focus of Peter Strasser’s analysis? I can look for specific examples of "joy" mentioned in the book if that would be useful.

• The "Success in Failure" Thesis: Strasser argues that Handke's characters and narratives often fail to mask a darker, chaotic reality (a "hell") within the "paradise" or utopian, joyful vision they are trying to create, suggesting the work is deeply ambivalent.
• Contextualized Appreciation: Strasser is cited for placing Handke's work within a broad philosophical context, exploring his ability to help readers see the world with gratitude (a form of "joy").
• A "Critical Note": Among reviewers, Strasser is noted for including one of the few critical notes in scholarly volumes regarding Handke, specifically by refusing to follow Handke’s critique to its full, potentially extreme, conclusion. 

While Strasser’s perspective is considered "very interesting" (fort interessante) in, for instance, French academic analysis of Handke's critics, it exists alongside many other interpretations of Handke's complex, often contradictory, thematic focus on joy, alienation, and language.

-------

Margaret Franklin  in the New Yorker  March 14, 2022    He got the Nobel Prize Dec 10, 2019

(I was amazed that she wrote in the margin after getting three-fourths of the way into the essay---and that she would admit to That --- surely she would have caught on way before that ----)

At this point—around three-quarters of the way through this nearly hundred-page essay—I wrote in the margin, “I’m starting to wonder whether this is really about mushrooms.” I was beginning to see echoes of Handke’s obsession with Serbia. The mushroom hunter is a lawyer whose work exonerates war criminals, and the account ends with something like an acknowledgment of error: “Mushroom seeking, and seeking of any kind, caused one’s field of vision to shrink. . . . And how one’s eyes weighed down one’s head when they remained fixed on the ground, and became dulled.”

But Handke has shown no remorse for his own error, no recognition that his single-minded line of inquiry might have shrunk his perspective. He continues to assert that he has done nothing wrong, that the questions he has asked—about the motivations for the Srebrenica massacre, which he considers unexplained; about the bias he perceives among Western journalists who reported Serb aggression and Bosnian suffering—serve the goal of “justice.” His defenders have argued that, since he writes “dialectically,” it is easy for individual sentences, taken out of context, to be misunderstood. When I began reading “A Journey to the Rivers,” I was prepared to believe that Handke had been misinterpreted, but the book was even more maddening than I could have imagined. Handke states outright that he rarely asks questions of people he encounters, relying instead on his imagination and assumptions.

Some erstwhile Handke admirers have tried to explain his obsession with Serbia as driven by dismay over the breakup of the “great Yugoslavia” that his mother’s stories had primed him to cherish. “After 1991, Handke needed a new myth, and he discovered it in Serbia,” J. S. Marcus wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2000. Handke prefers to identify with the underdog, as he perceived Serbia to be in the face of the West. And he has said that when Slovenia declared independence it was “as if I had lost my home, which became a state, where there was really only a people and a landscape.”

In a way, however, “A Journey to the Rivers” is no more maddening than Handke’s fiction, which relies on a similar dialectic of push and pull, denying resolution or reality for a world that appears to be willed into being through language. And as such it forms a logical, if regrettable, end point for Handke’s ideas. As Eugenides has pointed out, American postmodernism, as practiced by writers such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover, was political in nature: these writers’ distrust of narrative omniscience was linked to their distrust of the U.S. government. By contrast, Handke’s fiction, though similar in appearance—the circling and recircling style, the rejection of literary conventions—was always centered on language rather than on politics. “The American postmodernists gave up on traditional storytelling out of an essentially playful, optimistic, revolutionary urge,” Eugenides writes. “Handke despairs of narrative out of sheer despair.”

In Handke’s literary universe, only the self can be the final arbiter of meaning. The eye gazes from the window and records what it sees, while acknowledging that another observer might see something different. When some music plays in “The Fruit Thief,” we are told, “It did not really matter what music it was. Everyone who reads this is welcome to imagine any music that seems to fit.” But the idea that the facts of a situation can be whatever we say they are sounds different now from the way it may have thirty or forty years ago. Some realities—the mass graves at Srebrenica, or, more recently, the outcome of an election legally conducted—cannot be treated “dialectically.” Another line from Wittgenstein comes to mind, one often invoked to express the dangers of trying to describe the enormity of the Holocaust: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” ♦

so if we Strasserize Eugenides . . . "Handke despairs of narrative out of sheer joy."  Trying too hard, too much ??  Without knowing more AI seems to say Strasser somehow didn't stay long with his joy readings?  

Alice in the Cities

 

• Inspiration: The film was inspired in part by Handke's own experiences with single fatherhood.
• Collaboration: Handke was a frequent collaborator of Wenders, having written the screenplay for Wenders' earlier film, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.
• Thematic Connection: Alice in the Cities shares themes with Handke's 1972 novel, Short Letter, Long Farewell.
• Has a happy ending in the sense that the mother returns and reunites with here daughter. 
• Have to re-post the erotic view passage.  Just posted the clip on Instagram.  So important.  Will it show up again in Handke's narrative texts?  So far I haven't noticed it.   
• "I don't have the power of observation.  But I believe I have the gift of a sort of erotic view.  Suddenly I notice something that I have always missed, and not only do I see it, but I get a feeling for it.  That is what I call an erotic view.  Then I write not just an observation but an experience.  That's why I must go on being a writer.   at 1:13:37 in the film  

Just realized I got my books confused.  I am into "On a Dark Night I left My Silent House" a little bit.  The pharmacist in the nowhere land to Taxham.  But it was published in 1997 and before it comes "My Year in The No-Man's Bay," Mein Jahr en der Neimandsbucht" in 1994.  That's the big one about being blocked and lost, so perhaps I will keep on with both or stay with that one and go back to "On a Dark Night" after I finish Mein Jahr.  

Ten or nine years between The Afternoon of a Writer in 1989 and My Year in the No-Man's Bay in 1998.  

One more of the movie trilogy to watch--Kings of the Road.  

Monday of the last week in February.  Handke's sense of getting a feeling for seeing something he has always missed---the erotic view, an experience not just an observation, he writes then.  So important.  Key to the whole dissertation!  Will a

simple google about it reveal who has already written five books about it?  

rather frutiful results!!  --

Scholarly and critical writing regarding 

Peter Handke's

 "erotic view" often focuses on his exploration of erotic weariness and the aestheticization of the gaze.

Several authors and critics have analyzed these themes:

• Peter Handke himself: In his work Essay on Tiredness (Versuch über die Müdigkeit), Handke explores the concept of "erotic weariness," where fatigue can serve as a rejuvenating force that brings lonely individuals together. He famously modifies the idea of a "good couple" to "a tired man and a tired woman make the most beautiful couple".
• Peter Strasser
  : In his introduction to a collection of essays on the author, Strasser describes a "sexually charged" fascination with Handke's work, detailing his experience of "falling in love" with the texts as a form of critical engagement.
• Jeffrey Eugenides
  : In an introduction to Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Eugenides discusses Handke's "disciplined detachment" and "dispassionate" reporting on personal experiences, including his mother's affair, which highlights Handke's unique, often detached perspective on erotic subjects.
• Nina Pops
   and 
  Žarko Radaković
  : The artist 
  Nina Pops
   was inspired by Handke's book Pogled (The View), translating his obsessive, detailed descriptions of views (often from high vantage points) into visual art. This collaboration highlights the "obsessiveness" and "devotion" present in Handke’s particular way of looking at the world, which some critics link to a "geometrism" of the gaze.
• Gitta Honegger
  : In her criticism, she examines Handke's work through the lens of "Seeing Through the Eyes of the Word," focusing on how his perception of reality is mediated by linguistic forms.
• R.G. Renner
  : His research explores how narration and language in Handke's later works, such as Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, establish a physical and almost tactile relationship between the narrator and the characters.
• AI Overview
  Based on analyses of Peter Handke’s work, several critics, scholars, and commentators have explored his unique, often detached, and aestheticized "view" of the world, which includes erotic, sensory, and "slow" perspectives.

   

  Key figures who have analyzed or written about this aspect of Handke’s work include:

  • Gitta Honegger: Wrote "Peter Handke: Seeing Through the Eyes of the Word," which discusses Handke's emphasis on a specific mode of perception, referencing the Greek leuketin (a luminous, intense form of seeing) that blends perception with imagination.
  • Suhrkamp Verlag (Publishing House): In summaries of Handke’s Essay on Tiredness (or Essay on Wattling), they highlight how Handke analyzes everyday experience to explore the "erotic, cultural, and political implications" of slow motion and weariness.
  • Duncan McColl Chesney: Authored "Slow Down and Look: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Slowness in Handke," which examines the "long 1980s" and Handke's developed aesthetics/ethics of slowness.
  • Jeffrey Eugenides: In his introduction to a 2006 reissue of Handke’s work, he described Handke’s "disciplined detachment" in observing life, a key component of his "view".
  • Wim Wenders: As a close collaborator, Wenders worked with Handke to develop the "eye of the angel" perspective in Wings of Desire, which focuses on sensory pleasure and the "erotic" experience of being human.
  • Critics of "A Moment of True Feeling": Reviews in The New York Times have noted Handke’s shift towards a "Romantic affirmation" and a "stubborn uneasiness of his quest" in his narratives, which often focus on the sensory and existential. 

  Handke's "erotic view" is often described in these works as a form of "slow" observation—where the act of looking, resting, or experiencing fatigue becomes a way to, as the Suhrkamp summary puts it, "rejuvenate". This is often contrasted with a "cold" or "detached" narrative voice, such as in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams or The Left-Handed Woman. 
  
  

Wrong Move

 Sunday 

We skipped Chatter but later admitted we were sorry to have done so.  Bela now watching Sophie's Choice.  I finished watching Wenders' "Wrong Move" 1975.  Peter Handke script.  Old man with harmonica, Wilhelm, blonde actress, brown haired teen who juggles, poet (bad), industrialist in the ruined chateau who hangs himself during the night. Wilhelm played by Rudiger Vogler who also stars in the second road trip film Kings of the Road.  Watch that next.  Key lines:  

"I don't have the power of observation.  But I believe I have the gift of a sort of erotic view.  Suddenly I notice something that I have always missed, and not only do I see it, but I get a feeling for it.  That is what I call an erotic view.  Then I write not just an observation but an experience.  That's why I must go on being a writer.   at 1:13:37 in the film  

Being a parrot is humiliating.  The actress complains about being locked into other people's words for things.  

I want to be alone to live in my stupor.

At the end, on Germany's highest mountain, the Zugspitze (in the south) I felt I had missed out on something  and continued to miss out with every move.  Wrong move.  

----

Met the young woman who lives next door.  Jaylene?  degrees in business and public health.  Pulling up all the carpeting and putting in ceramic tile floors.  Charter high school in south Abq.  30s?  

Scanned much of Parry's book.  Helped situate Absence (note how similar it is to Wrong Move though in the sense of a group of odd characters, not in search of an author! but floating in absurd fairy tale.  

Landscape shows up for Handke to replace "meaning" of all sorts.  Becomes the armature and the mythos.  

Watch Kings of the Road next.  Bela wants to see winter olympics finale.  Hmm?  Sent off some cards to Emma and Eliot and the Hunnewells.  Happy to get their holiday letter and news news of their goings on.  

Cumberland pencils

The pencil lies diagonally across the book, in the small circle of light.  Its upper surface is imprinted, in block letters CUMBERLAND.  The writing beneath the pencil suggests several trains waiting on parallel tracks, the words being cars and the signs locomotives.  A whistle, as though to signal the trains' departure, is actually blown in the distance, prolonged by a whistle-blowing that fills the whole building. 

Peter Handke, Absence, page 9.  1990  1987 Die Abwesenheit   Also a movie 1992 The Absence 

my ideal had always been

 I couldn't be satisfied with a dissertation that would merely look for relationships in my field of inquiry--

my ideal had always been the gentle emphasis and appeasing flow of a narrative.    Handke Slow 189

For often, in reading and writing, , I had seen the truth of storytelling as a clarity in which one sentence calmly engenders another and in which the truth---the insight that came before the story---is perceptible only as a gentle something in the transitions between sentences.  Moreover, I knew that reason forgets, the imagination never.  190  

Then, in Grillparzer's The Poor Minstrel, I read "I trembled with a longing for unity."  A desire for the One in All was rekindled in me.  For I knew that unity is possible.  Every singled moment of my life hangs together with every other---without intermediate links.  I need only reconstitute that with the help of my imagination.  190  

some of my most favorite lines from Handke    

news late

 We had just seated ourselves Sunday in Los Cuates, the mariachi was singing.  My phone showed there were messages on Messenger from David and Scott Merrill.  Scott's message had been posted on Jan 1 (same day Joe died).  Phil died Dec 28.  I called Scott later that day.  He knew Phil had not been doing well for a while, was with him the night before and he was having trouble breathing, had been popping various old medicines over a few days.  A 911 call went out early Sunday morning, not clear how Scott learned about that later one, maybe from Phil's brother.  Later Ross and Scott made three visits to clear out the apartment and save some of Phil's papers and some momentos from themselves.  Ross Smart.  They talk about having a memorial get together later, maybe in May in Brattleboro.  

Quite a shock.  Felt sad all day, still.  Kim and Olen arrived that afternoon, wonderful visit with them.  They are at the Indian Cultural Center this morning.  Lou and B coming for lunch.  K and O will head back to Salida after they stop to say hello goodbye here.  Barry with them.  

Dennis excited about his move.  Has dates for the mover and for Skylar his neice to drive him to Philly.  

Finishing Handke's Child Story in Slow Homecoming.  Just ordered play he published year after that. 

Still astonished by the book, how he reconfigured the traditional material of the three "journeys" over landscape, geology and art, image and brushstroke, word choices, steps.  

Nina Kalkus the youngest, 8 years younger than older brother, who has two children, is a clinical psychologist in private schools, did univ at St Andrews. Oldest brother is ? Evan? have not gotten their names straight.  He works as an emt, may try to do med school but can't get it together.  They worry about him and about Nina.  

Ladies lunched.  Lou took a photo of us with K & O.  They headed off to home, high winds now gusting, hope they don't encounter any trouble with them.  

Finished H's Child Story and the whole of Slow Homecoming.  Have I enjoyed a book so much?  Maybe I enjoyed Repetition a bit more?  Child Story ends with Greek quote from Menander about suffering in childhood, punishment.  Greek view.  Tragic forms of experience.  Handke experiments in that essay with the distancing effect of third person and impersonal semi-abstract tone and attitude.  Trying to place his six years raising his daughter alone into the larger geology, landscape, of timeless human experience.  She attended a Jewish school for a year or so.  He so carefully honors that and globalizes that or anthropologizes that as a school and community for "the people."  

Did I read Across just before Christmas?  Amazon says I bought the book then and I think I did read it but I will ask chatgpt to give me a detailed summary to refresh memory.  

Phil Hart

 Scott Merrill wrote this obituary for Phil   on legacy.com 

Philip (Phil) B. Hart, 80, who devoted much of his life to teaching and advocating for others, died at his home in Newport, New Hampshire, on December 28, 2025.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, and raised in Ansonia, Connecticut, Phil was the son of William B. Hart and Christine (Ballantyne) Hart. He is survived by his brothers William B. Hart Jr. and James F. Hart; his nephew James Hart; nieces Halliday and Hawthorne; and many friends.

As a boy, Phil and his brothers worked at Hart's "five and dime" store in Seymour, Connecticut, owned by their father, who had served in the FBI and later as director of Mowglis School of the Open in Hebron, NH, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Phil's appreciation for the outdoors was shaped at Mowglis, where he spent summers with his brothers Jim and Bill before becoming a counselor himself and a long-time assistant director with his father.

Phil began his career as a professor and congregational minister in the 1970s. After earning a Master of Divinity from Hartford Seminary, he was ordained in the United Church of Christ (UCC) and founded the United Campus Ministry at what was then Plymouth State College in Plymouth, NH.

In addition to his work as campus minister—which included counseling students, providing grief support during crises, campus speaking events, and a Thanksgiving food drive that continues today—Phil served as advisor to the student newspaper, The Clock.

Phil taught in the philosophy department at "PSC" for nearly four decades, offering courses that crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries. His subject matter and intimate teaching style occasionally drew disapproval from department chairs, but his courses were among the college's most popular. Titles included Sex and Death, Personal Mythology, Intro to God, Women in Religion, Religion in America, and Sexual Ethics.

As a professor, Phil showed genuine concern for the individual, encouraging others to think for themselves, always with a dry sense of humor. Whether in the basement of Mary Lyons or later in Hyde Hall, his office was open to those seeking advice or reassurance.

Phil devoured books, played piano, and knew the words to countless hymns, which he sometimes sang spontaneously. He was also a writer; his poetry and short stories were playful, transgressive, and marked by intimacy, compassion, and humor.

He loved meandering road trips across the United States and Mexico, as well as sitting quietly on his porch with a White Russian or iced tea on summer nights.

Those who knew and were loved by Phil knew they were listened to and cared for. He took deep interest in others' experiences and ideas and was a source of comfort and understanding in difficult times. He will be missed by many.