ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the self-reflexive exploration of the aesthetic process in Bernhard’s novels The Loser , Woodcutters and Old Masters. Bernhard’s interest in Stimmung as a framework for experience is inextricably tied to his consideration of the relationship between artworks and their recipients across three different art forms: music, theatre and visual art. The reader here becomes the locus of a process of attunement, one that the texts direct and manipulate through specific formal and stylistic strategies. The affective dimension of reading is brought to the fore as Bernhard unravels established categories of meaning-making.
