Handke: in Zungen (in tongues)

This project investigates the dramatic literature by the Austrian writer Peter Handke (*1942).

Since the early 1980s, foreign languages have gained in importance in Peter Handke’s works. Along with a poetological turn towards epic narration, which influenced both Handke’s prose and dramatic texts and which happened at the same time that Handke took up his work as a translator, foreign languages found their way into the author’s stage texts.

This project collects, analyzes, and explores all foreign-language words and text parts from the more than 20 stage works Handke has written to date. The central questions concern the correlation of languages and semantic / subject areas, the dominance of certain languages, the relationships of the foreign languages to each other and the changes and developments of these aspects over time.

The project is thematically and technically affiliated to several smaller projects of the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (Austrian Academy of Sciences), among them the TEI Abstracts App and the Handke-App . Methodically, ‘Handke: in Zungen’ aims for a consistently open research process from beginning to end. Not only the data and results will be made publicly available, but also a detailed documentation of the individual steps taken to create these outcomes: the documentation is available via the project log on Github and the project’s twitter account .

“Handke: in Zungen” is located at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and supported by the Wikimedia Germany Open Science Fellowship program .