Word, Image & Architectural Historiography in W.G
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Architectural Representations in WG Sebald's Austerlitz And
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 40.2 September 2014: 221-243 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.2014.40.2.11 Among Mosaic Stars: Architectural Representations in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project Wenxi Wu Department of English Fudan University, China Abstract In the present study, I focus on the architecture in W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz and investigate how Sebald transforms the narrative of human construction into a kind of literary expression of his perspective on history and the nature of human existence. To explore this issue, I will juxtapose Sebald’s novel with Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. By making a comparative investigation into the stylistic features and cultural significance of some prominent architecture in both works, I wish to suggest that Sebald, in his novel that manifests a profound degree of intertextuality with The Arcades Project, inherited Benjamin’s skepticism about the progressive evolution of human society. Keywords W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, architecture, comparative literature I wish to express my deep gratitude to Professor Wen Jin, who inspired me to write about Sebald in her class and has been a constant guide and example throughout my studies. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers and the copy-editor of Concentric for their careful reading and valuable suggestions. 222 Concentric 40.2 September 2014 When the eponymous hero of the German expatriate writer W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz1 steps into the entrance hall of his childhood residence, Number 12 Šporkova, an exotic pattern on the floor comes into view: “the octofoil mosaic flower in shades of dove grey and snow white” (Sebald 213-14). -
Giving Voice to Silent Destruction Michelle A
Western Oregon University Digital Commons@WOU Student Theses, Papers and Projects (History) Department of History Spring 2016 Giving Voice to Silent Destruction Michelle A. Smail Western Oregon University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wou.edu/his Part of the Cultural History Commons, European History Commons, and the German Literature Commons Recommended Citation Smail, Michelle A., "Giving Voice to Silent Destruction" (2016). Student Theses, Papers and Projects (History). 48. https://digitalcommons.wou.edu/his/48 This Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at Digital Commons@WOU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Student Theses, Papers and Projects (History) by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@WOU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Smail 1 Michelle Smail Final Draft 01 June 2016 Giving Voice to Silent Destruction Introduction While answering a question about translation at a reading of Austerlitz1 held by the Jewish organization 92Y, German author W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) said, “In the case of this particular book [Austerlitz] there is a passage of some ten pages, which is a pastiche of the language of administration, which uh, my compatriots developed in the nineteen-thirties, more or less unwittingly to describe their own activities.”2 Here, Sebald has referred to the Nazis as compatriots, a trend that held true for him whenever he talked about them. However, far from sharing any Nazi views on racial supremacy, Sebald was awarded the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize for Fiction for both The Emigrants3 in 1997 and Austerlitz in 2002, which both centered on characters who had suffered from Nazi persecution. -
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Copyright by Robert George Kohn 2012 The Dissertation Committee for Robert George Kohn Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Language of Uncertainty in W.G. Sebald’s Novels Committee: Pascale Bos, Supervisor Sabine Hake John Hoberman Philip Broadbent David Crew The Language of Uncertainty in W.G. Sebald’s Novels by Robert George Kohn, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2012 Dedication This dissertation would not have been possible without the amazing and generous support, both emotional and intellectual, as well as incredible patience of my lovely and kind wife, Nadine Cooper-Kohn. I would like to, therefore, dedicate this study to her as a small token of my gratitude for being at my side through it all. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the following people for their help and contributions they have made to my intellectual and personal growth during my graduate career. First and foremost, I would like to recognize my wife, Nadine Cooper-Kohn for her steadfast support, inspiration and love throughout these past seven years. I would like to thank my adviser, Dr. Pascle Bos, for her patience and understanding throughout the process of writing, as well as for encouraging me during difficult times. The helpful feedback of Dr. Sabine Hake and Dr. John Hoberman inspired me and helped me to see this project through. -
The Stateless Novel: Refugees, Literary Form, and the Rise of Containerization
The Stateless Novel: Refugees, Literary Form, and the Rise of Containerization Sina Rahmani Halfway through Grant Gee’s film Patience (After Sebald ) (2012), Christopher MacLehose, the original publisher of the English translation of The Rings of Saturn (1998), recounts an anecdote about W. G. Sebald’s debut on the anglophone literary stage: One of the questions we asked him was, “Which category would you like your book to be in?” And Max [Sebald] said, “Oh, I’d like all the categories. I want fiction, I want biography, I want autobiography, I want travel, I want history, I want . .” Well, he didn’t say Holocaust Studies, but anyways, there wasn’t a category he didn’t require. Max was very clear, what he was saying was, “Don’t put me in a box; I want to be in all the boxes. I’m not writing a familiar formula.” This essay would not have been possible without the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I also benefited from helpful feedback from a number of patient readers: Imre Szeman, Todd Presner, Aamir Mufti, Jonathan Grossman, Yahya Elsaghe, Sanna Alas, Nada Ayad, Ian Newman, and Uwe Schütte. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. boundary 2 47:3 (2020) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 8524442 © 2020 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/103/813788/0470103.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 104 boundary 2 / August 2020 MacLehose’s account of Sebald’s resistance to generic classifica- tion is noteworthy for two reasons. -
Narrative Discourse, Memory and the Experience of Travel in W. G. Sebald's Vertigo
ACTA UNIVERSITATIS SAPIENTIAE, PHILOLOGICA, 8, 1 (2016) 67–78 DOI: 10.1515/ausp-2016-0005 Narrative Discourse, Memory and the Experience of Travel in W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo Judit PIELDNER Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Miercurea Ciuc, Romania) Department of Humanities [email protected] Abstract. Sebald’s first prose work, entitled Vertigo (Schwindel . Gefühle ,. 1990) is perhaps the most intriguing in terms of the absence of clear-cut links between the four narrative segments: “Beyle; or Love is a Madness Most Discrete,” “All’estero,” “Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva” and “Il ritorno in patria.” Beyle, i.e. Stendhal, Dr. K, i.e. Kafka, and the first-person narrator of the two quasi-autobiographical parts, are three subjects living in distinct times and places, whose journeys and experiences coalesce into a Sebaldian puzzle to solve, challenging the most varied interpretive terms and discourses, from the Freudian uncanny, through intertextuality (Kristeva) and the indexicality of photography (Barthes, Sontag), to the working of cultural memory (Assmann) and the non-places of what Marc Augé calls hypermodernity. By trying to disclose the discursive strategies of a profoundly elusive and highly complex narrative, the article is aimed at pointing out the rhetorical and textual connections lying at the heart of Sebald’s floating way of writing, heralding a vertiginous oeuvre, an unsettling literary journey.1 Keywords: travel, narrative, intertextuality, memory, photography, non- places. “Is literary greatness still possible? Given the implacable devolution of literary ambition, and the concurrent ascendancy of the tepid, the glib, and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects, what would a noble literary enterprise look like now? One of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. -
A Place in the Country Free
FREE A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY PDF W. G. Sebald,Jo Catling | 224 pages | 06 Mar 2014 | Penguin Books Ltd | 9780141037011 | English | London, United Kingdom Jonnie Irwin - Wikipedia Jonathan James Irwin born 18 November is an A Place in the Country television presenter, writer, lecturer, business and property expert. InIrwin was selected from hundreds of applicants along with co-presenter Jasmine Harman to present Channel 4 's [2] show A Place in the Sun — Home or Away[3] [4] and has filmed over episodes all around Britain. It has been documented that Irwin was visibly shaken by witnessing the manufacturing of harps in Escape to the Country. In JanuarySky 1 broadcast Irwin's A Place in the Country show called Dorm Lives for Sale[5] which saw him help people leave their UK lives behind and buy a business. In late he started a new series The Renovation Game which aired on weekday mornings on Channel 4. Over the past ten years, Irwin A Place in the Country advised clients on business and property from small high street gift shops to multimillion pound corporate hotel packages. He still runs a property and business consultancy. Irwin writes a regular column for A Place in the Sun magazine [6]. He appears at A Place in the Sun Live [7] giving presentations on hip hop tips for buying property abroad. Irwin also regularly hosts seminars and corporate events. Jonnie is commercial director at The Judicare Group and regularly advises on the purchase or disposal strategies of overseas properties. On 12 Februaryhe received an honorary doctorate from Birmingham City University. -
Foucault's Heterotopia in the Fiction of James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov
Real Places and Impossible Spaces: Foucault’s Heterotopia in the Fiction of James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.G. Sebald Kelvin Knight Thesis submitted for the qualification of Doctor of Philosophy University of East Anglia School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing February 2014 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Abstract This thesis looks to restore Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to its literary origins, and to examine its changing status as a literary motif through the course of twentieth-century fiction. Initially described as an impossible space, representable only in language, the term has found a wider audience in its definition as a kind of real place that exists outside of all other space. Examples of these semi- mythical sites include the prison, the theatre, the garden, the library, the museum, the brothel, the ship, and the mirror. Here, however, I argue that the heterotopia was never intended as a tool for the study of real urban places, but rather pertains to fictional representations of these sites, which allow authors to open up unthinkable configurations of space. Specifically, I focus on three writers whose work contains numerous examples of these places, and who shared the circumstance of spending the majority of their lives in exile: James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.G. -
In Transit: Sebald, Trauma, and Cinema
humanities Article In Transit: Sebald, Trauma, and Cinema Allen Meek School of English and Media Studies, Massey University, Palmerston North 4442, New Zealand; [email protected] Received: 13 October 2017; Accepted: 14 December 2017; Published: 18 December 2017 Abstract: Because Sebald’s books are preoccupied with historical catastrophe, particularly the Holocaust, critical commentaries have often interpreted them in terms of the transmission of traumatic memory. But this stress on the temporal relay from past to present and future generations has drawn attention away from the emphasis on space and travel in Sebald’s work. In order to address this gap in Sebald criticism, this essay discusses three films that adapt and respond to Sebald’s work: Patience (After Sebald) (directed by Grant Gee, 2012), Terezin (directed by Daniel Blaufuks, 2010) and Austerlitz (directed by Stan Neumann, 2015). Because of the cinema’s constant movement between images and places, these films allow us to see more clearly the aspects of Sebald’s writings concerned with traveling and making connections between different archival spaces. The journeys in Sebald’s books and in these films inspired by them go beyond human life worlds to include non-human creatures, and beyond the realms of the living to include those inhabited by the dead. This suspension of the boundary between life and death, along with the restless movement from place to place, creates a relationship to memory and history that cannot be limited to the model of traumatic transmission. Keywords: Sebald; -
A Study of the Freudian Uncanny in WG Sebald's Austerlitz
The Japanese Society for Aesthetics Aesthetics No.19 (2015): 88-105 Thresholds of Remembrance: A study of the Freudian uncanny in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz SUZUKI Yoshiko Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo 1. Introduction: Key Aspects of W. G. Sebald’s Works I would like to discuss in this paper some remarkable arts dealing with memory by the German author, W. G. Sebald, with reference to the visual images included in his works. W. G. Sebald is known as one of the most important authors who were engaged with the question of how to describe histories and memories in the post-Holocaust period. His works deal with the problem of how to retrieve memories of survivors who suffer from trauma and memories of the dead. He was born in 1944 in Allgäu, Germany during the War. He can be regarded as one of so- called 1968 generation, or ‘Nachgeborene’ in German. In the late 1960’s, he migrated to England, and settled in 1969 in East Anglia, where he lived until his death in 2001. His major works, sometimes referred to as ‘prose fiction’, are characterized by his peculiar textual style, that is, by a kind of hybrid blending of novel, essay, memoir, and travel writing. Sebald inserts images such as photographs or reprinted images into these prose works. He wrote four works of prose fiction in all: Vertigo fig. 1 (in German, Schwindel. Gefühle.) published in 1990, The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten) published in 1992, The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Saturn) published in 1995, and Austerlitz published in 2001. -
WG Sebald's Austerlitz He Ning
The Bricolage of Words and Images: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz He Ning Translated by Claire Xue Li The name W. G. 塞巴尔德 (the Chinese transliteration of W. G. Sebald) was unknown to most Chinese readers until 2010, when Auster- litz, his final work, became available in Chinese Mandarin.1 This is nothing new; even in the author’s native Germany, his name remained unnoticed until the late 1990s. Today, however, his writings are highly renowned— particularly in the UK, the US, and France—endorsed by Susan Sontag, and once tipped as a future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Winfried Georg Sebald was born in Wertach, Germany, and grew up in the shadow of his father’s reticence to speak about the war. Moving to This article is translated from a Mandarin article 文字与照片的拼接—评W. G.赛巴尔 德的《奥斯特里茨》, which appeared in Trends of Foreign Literature (《外国文学动 态研究》) in 2012. Trends of Foreign Literature is the first academic journal established in Communist China, beginning in 1955. Its publisher is the China Social Science Academy, the top academic organization in arts and humanities in China.—Trans. 1. Austerlitz was translated into Mandarin by Diao Chengjun and was published by China Yilin Press in 2010. boundary 2 47:3 (2020) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 8524505 © 2020 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/185/813784/0470185.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 186 boundary 2 / August 2020 the UK in 1966, he began teaching modern German literature at the Univer- sity of East Anglia in the early 1970s. -
Troubling Signs: Sebald, Ambivalence, and the Function of the Critic
Troubling Signs: Sebald, Ambivalence, and the Function of the Critic Uwe Schütte, Aston University, Birmingham, UK. The authorial figure of Winfried Georg Sebald is considerably less homogenous than it appears to most commentators. Not only was he torn between the languages of his native Ger- many and his adopted home England, he navigated the threshold between the academy and the world of literature. Moreover, his career as a writer was marked by a peculiar ambivalence be- tween peripheral status and central importance. His ascent in the Anglophone sphere—taking place more or less during the five-year period between the respective translations of The Emi- grants in 1996 to Austerlitz in 2001–is marked by an overwhelmingly positive critical reception. The latter found its way onto countless syllabi and attracted intense scholarly attention not long after its initial publication. Although the first book on Sebald in any language was published in 1995—a slim collection of newspaper reviews, interviews, and short essays (Loqai)—very little critical scrutiny followed in subsequent years. Germanic academics took more than a decade af- ter Sebald emerged as a notable literary figure before deeming him worthy of serious attention. And even then, this interest was limited to mostly doctoral students and junior faculty. That his canonization took considerably longer in the German-speaking world and failed to match the enthusiasm of his Anglophone readers can be attributed to the considerable body of often highly-controversial scholarship Sebald published during his three-decade-long academic career. Speaking broadly, one can divide his critical output into three categories. -
Pastoral Modes in the Poetry and Prose Fiction of W.G
Pastoral Modes in the Poetry and Prose Fiction of W.G. Sebald Grahame J. Lavis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English and Comparative Literature Goldsmiths College, University of London April 2014 1 ABSTRACT In this thesis I extend the discussion of the works of W.G. Sebald beyond the more commonly discussed themes of melancholy, trauma, loss and memory. To this end I examine his long prose poem After Nature and his four books of prose fiction Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz to expose underlying pastoral modes and structural forms in these texts. In After Nature I make the case for this poem to be read as an anti-pastoral text which runs true to the elegiac form but exhibits a subtext of pastoral and anti-pastoral tension. The first published work of prose fiction, Vertigo, I argue demonstrates the pastoral structural device, integral to pastoral form, of the double-plot and in so doing, extend William Empson’s original thesis. In The Emigrants, I examine the parallels between Heimat and Pastoral by exposing the characters’ difficult relationships with displacement both physically and psychologically and argue for an anti-Heimat mode expressed largely in anti-pastoral imagery. The Rings of Saturn demonstrates the impossibility of utopia by constantly deferring a potential pastoral both spatially and temporally during the narrator’s “pilgrimage” across the Suffolk countryside. And finally in Austerlitz, we have a coalescence of pastoral modes structured as a discourse of retreat and return which, I argue, qualifies this work as a truly pastoral novel.