Gestic intertextuality in Elfriede Jelinek’s Bambiland

This article considers Elfriede Jelinek's use of intertextuality in the play Bambiland (2003) as a method for criticizing the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Taking into account the debates around the uneasy categorization of Jelinek's Sprachflächen [language surfaces], this article positions Jelinek as inheritor of the German modernist tradition, specifically Brecht's epic theatre, as well as noting her poststructuralist approach to language following the work of Julia Kristeva on intertextuality. In an effort to update Brecht's ideas around gestus for the twenty-first century (according to Brecht's own instructions), it argues that the complex intertextuality of Bambiland can usefully be understood as gestic. Expanding on the way that Brechtian gestus shows behaviour to be learned rather than innate, this article suggests that a new gestic intertextuality in Bambiland is a literary form that draws attention to the ways in which our Western understanding of the Iraq War is also learned, constructed and ideologically mediated by various interest groups.