Masterarbeit

This thesis is a comparative study of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Die Klavierspielerin, its English translation The Piano Teacher by Joachim Neugroschel, and the screen adaptation La Pianiste by Michael Haneke with a special focus on gender and perspective. Jelinek’s literary career, political and feminist engagement, and biography are reviewed. Brief considerations of feminist writing and gender are presented according to Butler, Spivak, Cixous, Irigaray, Bourdieu and Lacan. There follows an analysis of Jelinek’s feminist thought and writing, as well as of her language and style. Translation studies, which underlie the thesis, are also reviewed in view of translation and gender according to Von Flotow, Simon, Eco and Venuti.
The thesis then addresses the implications of feminist writer Jelinek having been translated from an apparently male perspective through a contrastive study of Die Klavierspielerin and the English translation of the novel by Neugroschel. This focuses on an examination of gender-relevant transformations and omissions in the translation.
Changes in perspective in Haneke’s film La Pianiste are analyzed from the point of view of feminist film theory, and with reference to relevant reviews and interviews. Haneke’s German-language film script is compared with the French dialogue in the original film and its English subtitles with a view to understanding to what extent gender and perspective can (or do) make a difference in translation and interpretation.

2008 © Renée von Paschen

Die Arbeit ist 2016 im AkademikerVerlag erschienen.

Informationen zu Reneé von Paschen