Elfriede Jelinek

their characters’ overinterpretation of them to characterise the respective protagonists, although Jelinek focuses on comparing two characters as foils, while Bernhard has his narrator project and internalize the traits he identifies in a dirty old cap. While Anna literally looks to Sophie to place herself in context, Bernhard’s narrator is living alone in a transient place, and hides from anything and everything he sees at first. Anna always sees the richer, prettier Sophie as an ideal that she will never be able to reach. After she purges in a school bathroom, Anna steps out and “snow-white Sophie ... whirls past her first, burying her. Sophie the avalanche” (Jelinek 23). Anna does her best to match Sophie’s opulence how she can, hence the bulimia, but there’s no way to compare. Like an avalanche, Sophie is perfectly clean and completely overwhelming. She is a blindingly immaculate force of nature whereas Anna has vivid memories of cutting herself open, and seems to be obsessed with extracting everything inside of herself that she considers “filth [she brings] with her from home, like a magnet” (Jelinek 22). Because of course, the fact that Anna is dirty and human when juxtaposed with Sophie comes back to their different social statuses. Anna tracks lack of riches like mud into wherever she goes, while Sophie is “made of the finest repellent material: the material repels dirt” (Jelinek 22). A repellent material is something beyond stain-resistant. Sophie barely notices the…

Pornography and Society in the film The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke In 2001, Michael Haneke directed a film called, The Piano Teacher based on a book by Elfriede Jelinek. Haneke portrays to the viewer as not railing against pornography, per se, but railing against its impact as generated by men or, moreover, by a capitalist-patriarchal society. This similar modality of thinking was introduced by Linda Williams in 1989, in which she “...moves beyond the impasse of the…