Ovid und seine Brüder

Christoph Ransmayr's novel, 'Die letzte Welt' (1988) made a fool of literary critics, especially those who believed they were addressed by it: the theoreticians of post-modernism. "Death of the author"? Certainly, but what then is the point of the "Ovidian repertoire", in which everything lost can be re-found, and of the blatantly virtuoso staging of that post-modern theorem by Ransmayr? The present paper takes a recurrent date as its point of departure, which auratically mystifies the notion of author origin: March 20th, the birthday of Ovid, of his Australian 'successor' David Malouf, and of Ransmayr. It explores a new reading between the dissolution and the hieratic rehabilitation of the author by following the tracks and the "intertextual baggage" of a much neglected character in 'Die letzte Welt', namely Pythagoras. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]