On January 17th, Britta Kallin, associate professor of German in the School of Modern Languages, presented her research at the Elfriede Jelinek Symposium in Salzburg, Austria.

Kallin’s talk, entitled “Fairy tale figures and intertextual strategies in selected works by Elfriede Jelinek,” examined the usage of fairy tale characters in Jelinek’s plays “Snow White” (1999), “Das Werk” (1999), “Rosamunde” (1999), and “Sleeping Beauty” (2000).

“My intersectional reading shows how the author outlines outdated gender roles and questions the inscribed “whiteness” and Christian undertones of the fairy tales,” said Kallin.

Jelinek, an Austrian Nobel laureate, wrote several plays that deal with fairy tales demonstrating a feminist re-writing of the underlying messages of traditional fairy tales in the Western canon.

The workshop analyzed some of Jelinek’s writing in terms of form, function, and poetological backgrounds of these transitions from a transdisciplinary perspective.