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Austrian Inner Colonialism and the Visibility of Difference in Stifter's Die Narrenburg

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Joseph Metz
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Abstract

This essay reads the novella Die Narrenburg (1844; “The Castle of Fools”), by the Austrian germanophone writer Adalbert Stifter (1805–68), in terms of colonial and postcolonial theory. I argue that Die Narrenburg captures the moment when race becomes visible in a multinational Austrian Empire figured as inner colonial space. The novella also offers a challenge to the reality of race emerging into visibility and presents a strikingly modern picture of divided colonial consciousness, its desires suspended melancholically between the symptomatic maintenance of imperialist identifications and a sensitivity to the colonized that anticipates Frantz Fanon. The text thus exposes Hapsburg Austria as an unexpected symbolic locus for thinking about European racial and colonial discourse. It serves as a perceptive theorist of race and colonialism in a broad sense and suggests how we might read other seemingly peripheral works of central European literature for insights into intra- and extra-European colonial contexts. (JM)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 5 , October 2006 , pp. 1475 - 1492
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

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