'The Young Hunger Artists: The Portrayal of Eating Disorders by Contemporary Austrian Women Writers'

This paper explores how the abuse of food by young women is an expression of the need for attention as well as a form of self-punishment in psychological and physiological terms. In Anna Mitgutsch’s novel “Die Züchtigung” (“Punishment”, 1985) the daughter attempts to hinder the development of her femininity in order to abate her mother’s increasing hatred of her. At the same time she binges to prove to the rest of society that her mother has been feeding her well and is therefore a ‘good’ mother. In this ambivalent mother-daughter relationship Mitgutsch illustrates how the daughter agonises over her mother’s self-sacrifice, whilst eating/not eating in an almost sacrificial manner. Later she diets to please her lover and in the process becomes anorexic. This obsessive behaviour is the focus of Helene Flöss’ “Dürre Jahre” (“The Lean Years”, 1998). Here the desire to have the figure of a model begins at the age of 15 and ends after 7 years of calorie counting in a psychiatric ward for psychosomatics, where the protagonist weighs just 34 kilos. Both Mitgutsch’s and Flöss’ novels feature young women who suffer at the hands of family and social pressures, so much so that they are prepared to starve and are starved of love

The grandmother in recent Austrian literature: Peter Henisch, Eine sehr kleine Frau (2007) and Melitta Breznik, Das Umstellformat (2002)

In this paper I explore two examples of ‘Grossmütterliteratur’: Peter Henisch’s novel Eine sehr kleine Frau (2007), and Melitta Breznik's Das Umstellformat (2002). Both authors have also written earlier novels, Henisch's Die kleine Figur meines Vaters (1980) and Breznik's debut novel Nachtdienst (1995) which provide a starting point for comparison of third-generation family novels centred on the narrator's grandmother with the earlier genre of Väterliteratur. Henisch's Eine sehr kleine Frau tells of the secrecy surrounding the grandmother's Jewish descent, maintained also long after the end of the war; Breznik centres on the fate of the narrator's grandmother who was murdered in the Nazi euthanasia programme. These texts exemplify an emergent trend which takes into account the ever-growing distance from the Nazi period and both present the grandmothers not as victims, but as powerful figures whom the narrators bring back into memory by uncovering family secrets and revealing trut

Eating Disorders or Disordered Eating? [Introduction]

The abuse of food by young women is often an expression of the need for attention as well as a form of self-punishment in psychological and physiological terms. This chapter focuses on how contemporary Austrian authors, Anna Mitgutsch and Helene Flöss, raise awareness of eating disorders by exploring the issues of family and social pressures through two fictional accounts, namely Die Züchtigung [Punishment] (1985) and Dürre Jahre [The Lean Years] (1998). In the former I explain the impact of an abusive mother on the sexual underdevelopment of her daughter; in the latter I illustrate how a young girl’s obsession with the desire to be thin has nearly fatal consequences. In doing so, I revisit the hunger artists of old and show how these modern female bodies can successfully break free from their ‘cage’, when a supportive environment provides a possible path to recovery