Melodrama as counter-discourse

Kafka's reported reaction on first reading a volume of poetry by a particularly strident expressionist writer – “It is screaming. That is all” – has frequently been taken more broadly as expressing his general attitude of skepticism towards the expressionist movement as a whole. Brief as it is, Kafka's response nevertheless constitutes a troubling criticism, pointing to an inherent danger within expressionism where the seemingly liberating impulse towards expression turns into mere excess, into an hysterical “sound and fury” which exhausts itself at the level of its extravagant and desperate gestures and fails to carry any further meaning with it.

In this chapter however I would like to propose that it is precisely this hysterical aspect of expressionism which aligns it with another literary mode, namely melodrama, whose method is similarly excessive, yet whose deeper significance lies in the fact that it resorts to such “screaming” only in order to reach beyond dominant representational systems, codes and conventions, and beyond the epistemological and discursive restrictions associated with them.