Gute Zeiten, böse Räume : Brünner "Kleinstadtphantastik" bei Karl Hans Strobl und Karl Wilhelm Fritsch
| Title in English | Good times, bad spaces : Brno "small town fantasy" by Karl Hans Strobl and Karl Wilhelm Fritsch |
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Andere Wirklichkeiten : Pararealitäten in der österreichischen Literatur |
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| Keywords | fantasy; German literature from Bohemia and Moravia; modernism; Moravia |
| Description | Alluding to the classic on modernist literary fantasy, Stephan Berg's monograph Schlimme Zeiten, böse Räume (1991), the article characterises two classics of modernist Brno fantasy literature using the neologism "small-town fantasy". The novels in question are Eleagabal Kuperus (1910) by Karl Hans Strobl and Die Mondfabrik (1924) by Karl Wilhelm Fritsch. What is potentially unsettling about the term "small-town fantasy"? Firstly, it is not the aspect of the location, i.e. it is not that literary fantasy is fundamentally incompatible with the small-town milieu. Rather, the disturbing aspect is that small-town and fantasy each imply completely different models of knowledge and cognition and that the term "small-town fantasy" is highly paradoxical in this sense: "small-town fantasy" does not destabilise and irritate "the connection between empirical reality and transcendental ideality" and does not lead "to the collapse of reliable epistemologies" and thus does not fulfil the definition of the genre (Brittnacher/May). Instead, it has an affirmative effect. This characteristic is also explored in Strobl's essays on fantasy. |
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