Critical essays on Julian Schutting

International scholars review here most of the work by Julian Schutting (born 1937) produced between 1973 and 1997, concluding that Schutting has taken up his rightful place in the literary and intellectual history of the twentieth century. Schutting combines a classic self-consciousness in his writing in that he expands the repertoire of the possible without overturning the rules governing German grammar and syntax, with a determination to rebel against precisely those conventions. This is why he is both an insecure heir to the 'great tradition' in German poetry from Goethe to Hoelderlin and a fellow traveler of the first wave of the European Avant-Garde ('die Wiener Gruppe'). At times he yields to the pressures of modernism's notion of the writer as genius struggling with a destiny of 'greatness.' -- The surrender to melancholia is at the heart of the work, which never loses its link with the purely personal. Sometimes the purely personal is shrouded in pseudo-objectivity. His forays into intellectual controversy -- like his meditations on the meaning of the Shoah to contemporary Austria -- are the exception in his writings.