Peter Handke's "movement" between tradition, provocation and language games

Abstract

The article investigates Peter Handke’s essayistic, narrative, and dramaturgical production, highlighting the meaning that the term ‘movement’ assumes within it and, finally, focuses on the short novel Mein Tag im anderen Land: Eine Dämonengeschichte (My Day in the Other Country. A Demon Story, 2021) and in the diaries Vor der Baumschattenwand nachts Zeichen und Anflüge von der Peripherie 2007-2015 (At Night, in front of the Wall with the Shadow of the Trees. Signs and Omens from the Periphery 2007-2015, 2018) of the Austrian writer. The main aim of the article is to demonstrate that the peculiarities of Handke’s specific poetics of both action and “autonomous commitment” are still evident in these last two works, whose constitutive part is the author’s typical “linguistic ingenuity” thanks to which, as one can read in the motivation of the Nobel Prize for literature received in 2019 by the writer, since his debut he has been able to “explore the periphery and the specificity of human experience”.