"Hoping without Hope": Positive Pessimism in the Literary Works of Marlen Haushofer Sibylle Berg
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation offers a reading of select texts by literary writers Marlen Haushofer and Sibylle Berg as "positively pessimistic". Via three chapters, I engage in close textual analysis and place Haushofer’s novels Die Wand and Die Mansarde into conversation with Berg’s Vielen Dank für das Leben and Der Mann schläft. The goal of this project is to challenge the prevailing reception of these texts, which deems them utterly hopeless or dystopian in their outlook. In particular, I argue for the positive messages inherent in the novels’ engagement with topics of deviance, isolation, confusion, and despair, drawing also on theories of psychoanalysis, gender, and existentialism. By critically discussing concepts such as progress, rationality, subjectivity, hope, and happiness, I re-evaluate and deconstruct common societal understandings of and approaches to the notions of "good" and "bad" as these are projected onto the novels’ depictions of the human condition that is deemed fundamentally helpless. The analysis concludes that the novels’ respective radical content and disconcerting tone actually call for an absolute commitment to goodness and love, and a sensory reconnection with the surrounding world that can be achieved by gaining distance from symbolic pillars of identity, as well as by cultivating an awareness that life’s meaning remains enigmatic and that one is both alive and is also going to die. What results from this worldview is an enhanced gratitude for being alive, a playfulness towards the everyday, and the possibility for an intense contact and genuine connection with others and the natural world. I argue that the authors can only convey these positive messages by previously uncovering and foregrounding the timeless destruction and emptiness that lingers at the core of the social order and that frames nearly every aspect of human life. For this reason, I qualify Berg’s and Haushofer’s uncompromised commitment to unsentimental portrayals of negative feelings, decay, and destruction "positively pessimistic".
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".