A new Monograph about the Nobel Prize laureate, Peter Handke

Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Banja Luka, Anđelka Krstanović, PhD, published an internationally significant monograph dedicated to the poetics of the Nobel Prize laureate Peter Handke, titled: „Furcht und Katharsis der Autorschaft. Peter Handkes Langsame Heimkehr“ (The horror and catharsis of authorship: The slow return home of Peter Handke). 

The monograph, enriched with photos of the Nobel laureate, was published in Hamburg by publisher “Dr Kovac”, and the afterword was written by Leopold Federmair, one of the leading German-language experts in Austria.

In a new monograph, written in German, the author focuses on a turning-point work in the development of the Austrian author – “The slow return home” (1979-1981), a tetralogy collection in which Handke presents the tormenting stages of his literary-spiritual transformation and arrival at the authentic author’s expression. The monograph shows how the author managed to express, using his language means, the inner truth of his spiritual life, but also the truth of the external world.

In the previous monograph, „Peter Handke auf dem Weg zum Erzählenˮ, 2021 (Peter Handke on the road to storytelling), Prof. Krstanović analyzed Handke’s writing in the first two decades of his creative work, showing how the author critically revisited the traditional flow of storytelling and the relation between perception and language. 

Now edition continues that line, analyzing the manner in which Handke in his “Slow return home” develops a new storytelling strategy, based on direct description of primary perceptions and authentic language expression.

The monograph points out how Handke in his tetralogy achieved the primal harmony between the perception of the world and the storyteller’s words, and how the authorship as a literary principle becomes a means of construction and interpretation of the experienced in the frame of literary fiction.

It is also important to stress that, before this monograph, Prof. Krstanović published two scientific papers with the Austrian Academy of Science, also dedicated to Handke’s literary opus. 

Participation in the Congress and a visit to Handke’s birthplace  

During the Summer of 2025, Professor Krstanović participated in the Congress of international German language experts in Graz, titled “Twisted time. The function of language and literature before the challenge of global crisis and catastrophes”, where she presented her work “Literature on and in times of crisis from the standpoint of Nobel laureates Albert Camus and Peter Handke.”

She concluded her visit to Austria with a tour of Griffen, the birthplace of Peter Handke. She was accompanied by Handke’s long-standing friend, Valentin Hauser, and visited the writer’s birth-house, the standing exhibition dedicated to the Nobel laureate, and other locations significant for Handke’s childhood that represent the important thematic focus in his literary works.