Guest Lecture: Samuel Frederick, Professor, Penn State University

Reading Maja Haderlap with György Lukács

Whose life does the novel tell? Georg Lukács argues in Die Theorie des Romans (written 1914/15) that this uniquely modern form of narrative tells the life of an individual. Indeed, it is the biographical shape of the novel that allows it to approximate the lost totality of the epic. In this talk, I interrogate Lukács’s idea using the 2011 novel Engel des Vergessens by Maja Haderlap. In this book, the biographical form is disrupted by multiple incomplete stories that come from the community of Slovenians who live in Austria. I look closely at the structure of Haderlap’s book, asking how Lukács might help us better understand what it is doing as a novel. My main claim is that Engel des Vergessens illustrates—and in part overcomes—the problem at the center of Lukács’s theory: how can the novel create a coherent whole out of what remains irredeemably fragmentary? And since the restoration of epic totality is impossible, is the novel’s only option to pick up the pieces in the hope that their sum might add up to something adequate?