Textual Entanglements explores how the material processes of writing manifest in the published works of three twentieth-century Austrian authors: Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Bernhard, and Peter Handke. These authors left behind material traces of their writing processes, whether in notebooks, piles of disorganized typewritten sheets, or manuscript fragments. These materials do not merely act as containers for their texts: they spill into the semantic content of the writing, becoming entangled in it. The idiosyncratic materials and methods of the writing process do not disappear when the work enters print.

Examining these material traces, Textual Entanglements contends that we cannot fully understand these texts' semantic dynamics without considering the material circumstances of their production. Jacob A. Haubenreich reads Rilke, Bernhard, and Handke to argue that the materiality of textual production opens up a broader semiotic field in which meaning can be created. His book offers a theoretical framework and methodological models for integrating analysis of textual materiality into literary analysis in ways that expand the boundaries of literary interpretation.

Jacob A. Haubenreich is Assistant Professor of German at Johns Hopkins University.