The Literary Idea

Exhibition
31/1 1998 — 20/3 1998
Museumsquartier

Literary exhibitions usually concentrate on a specific author and his or her life and work. This exhibition, however, aspires to an overall approach: the process of development of literary works is shown in seven chapters. What is at the beginning of a literary text: a detailed plan or a spontaneous thought? How does its development proceed, in a formally calculated manner or just by growing anarchically? How are the ideas as images translated into language and what significance do the first sentences have? These questions will be debated on the basis of works by very different authors ranging from Johann Nestroy, Franz
Grillparzer and Ödön von Horváth to Ingeborg Bachmann, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Friederike Mayröcker, Ernst Jandl and Werner Schwab.