Time & Perspective Quote by Elfriede Jelinek

Jelinek’s standard for prizeworthy writing is deliberately double-edged: totalizing in scope, corrosive in method. She wants a “panorama of society as a whole” not as a comfortable wide-angle shot, but as an image assembled from unstable lenses - “new linguistic and formal modes” that refuse the illusion of neutrality. The phrase “keeps employing” matters: innovation isn’t a stylistic flex, it’s a survival tactic. If power adapts, art has to mutate faster.

Then comes the real tell: “while at the same time exposing it.” Jelinek isn’t asking literature to represent the world; she’s asking it to compromise the world’s alibis. “Tearing the masks from its face” frames society as performance - gender, class, nation, media consensus - a choreography of acceptable roles. Her theater background sharpens this: masks aren’t metaphors pulled from nowhere; they’re stage technology. The subtext is that society is already dramaturgy, and the writer’s job is to sabotage the script.

Contextually, this sits cleanly inside Jelinek’s postwar Austrian project: a culture eager to stage itself as civilized and innocent while repressing complicity, misogyny, and fascist afterlives. Her own work treats language as contaminated material - advertising slogans, political euphemisms, porn, pop refrains - and re-edits it until it confesses. The “award” line reads like a sly challenge to institutions: if you want to honor literature, honor the kind that makes you look bad, using forms you can’t easily domesticate.