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Nestroy meets Wagner. Parody as an alternative literary concept and a test bench for stylistics

    Oswald Panagl, Christina Katsikadeli

Corpus Linguistics and Literature, pp. , 2018/11/22

43rd Austrian Linguistics Conference
at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria
December 8th 2017

doi: 10.1553/Nestroy


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doi:10.1553/Nestroy


Abstract

The language peculiarities of Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801 – 1862) – as used in his Possen, parodies and dramas – are considered the literary highlights of the Old-Viennese Volkstheater. A comprehensive study, which explores the linguistic facets of J.N. Nestroy’s theatrical corpus from the point of view of modern linguistics, still remains a desideratum. In the present paper we investigate Johann Nestroy’s critical confrontation with the music and the libretti of Richard Wagner’s romantic operas Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, which aims at targeting the medieval milieu, the ‘precarious’ theme (in the cellar of Venus!), but especially the long-winded stage directions, the (hyper)archaic word choice, the exaggerated epithets, the pathetic diction, and not least, the ‘rampant’ metaphors in these music dramas. By making use of methods and tools employed by corpus linguistics, the objective of this paper is to search for general and specific patterns of Nestroy’s parodies, not only in representative examples, but also to classify them within the genre and interpret them according to a set of linguistic parameters.