SOURCE: “Language and the Fall from Grace in Grillparzer's Spielmann,” in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Vol. XII, No. 4, November, 1976, pp. 215-35.

In the following essay, Browning explores “a constitutive (but hitherto unnoted) theme of the novella—that of language or the word—and to offer some suggestions as to its possible meaning.”

Grillparzer's most ‘prosaic’ work is also his most poetic. It is no doubt for this reason that it has found so many exegetes: with great poetry we are never done.¹ It is my primary purpose here to point out what seems to me to be a constitutive (but hitherto unnoted) theme of the novella—that of language or the word—and to offer some suggestions as to its possible meaning. In order to arrive at my main object I must unfortunately do what the novella also does, namely, adumbrate the themes introduced before the...