Jelinek

Jelinek is agoraphobic and suffers from social phobia, and rarely ventures out of her home (she accepted the Nobel via a recorded video), but she finds it easy to socialize on the Internet.

Boing Boing 2007

The power structure of society is reflected most clearly in Jelinek through sexuality, but it is also seen in her attacks on the language of advertizing and the media and, most of all, in her criticism of political clichés and empty phrase-making.

Elfriede Jelinek: Provocation as the Breath of Life 2005

With her fellow-countrymen Karl Kraus and Thomas Bernhard as satirical and polemical models, Jelinek is a peculiarly inconvenient and sharp critic of Austrian society and its Catholic and authoritarian background.

Elfriede Jelinek: Provocation as the Breath of Life 2005

Once again Jelinek makes her own connections between the present and past in the play with the idyllic title In

Elfriede Jelinek: Provocation as the Breath of Life 2005

Jelinek is never afraid of tackling this conflict in order to get her new perspective on the female and the male, on the past and the political course of events to appear.

Elfriede Jelinek: Provocation as the Breath of Life 2005

Even if a mother perceives herself as an "angry" martyr, in Jelinek's work she is the one who, unreflectingly, carries out the oppression which is institutionalised in the dominant male-ordered social structure:

Elfriede Jelinek: Provocation as the Breath of Life 2005

But none of the women in Jelinek's novels and plays are to be regarded as purely passive figures, as objects of men's lust and oppression.

Elfriede Jelinek: Provocation as the Breath of Life 2005

Just as in her feminism Jelinek is a merciless observer and depicter of power and powerlessness, so also does she let the searchlight of her mind and pen sweep over the memory of the Nazi past and over the political landscape of present-day Austria.

Elfriede Jelinek: Provocation as the Breath of Life 2005

Jelinek is that there is no sympathetic narrator in whom the reader can rest and with whom the reader can identify.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2004 - Presentation Speech 2004

Jelinek is the strange, mixed voice that speaks from her writing.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2004 - Presentation Speech 2004