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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. -
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. -
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. -
Reparation in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder by Ben Streeter B.A. in Political Science, May
Reparation in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder by Ben Streeter B.A. in Political Science, May 2013, Gettysburg College M.A. in English, December 2019, The George Washington University Thesis submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts January 10, 2020 Thesis directed by Marshall W. Alcorn Professor of English Table of Contents Table of Contents …..………………………………………………………………….…ii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: The Sebald and Modiano Generation……………………………………….…4 Chapter 2: Imagination and Reparation………..……………………………………….…7 Chapter 3: Readers Respond to Affect of Trauma………..…………………………...…24 Chapter 4: Shifting the Cultural Discourse………..…………………………………..…37 References...………..……………………………………….……………………………44 Epigraph: “By compassion we make others’ misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also.” Thomas Browne, Religio Medici . Introduction W. G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano are two contemporary authors who share similar themes and literary practices. They are both fastidiously or even obsessively historical in their narrative development. And they seem preoccupied with the sins of World War II. Critics have divided feelings about their accomplishments. Skeptics say their trauma narratives induce despair, are complicated for complication’s sake, and overstate trauma’s imperviousness to healing. Advocates say their fictions bring to the present with emotional immediacy historical injustices that have yet to be fully reckoned with. This essay argues that Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) and Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997) do important political work in their fastidious historical narratives. In recreating the suffering of the past, these authors pull their readers into participating in acts of historical reparation, which are critical to social progress. -
Word, Image & Architectural Historiography in W.G
WORD, IMAGE & ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIOGRAPHY IN W.G. SEBALD’S AUSTERLITZ (2001) A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES OF MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY BY SEDA SOKULLU IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE SEPTEMBER 2015 Approval of the Graduate School of Social Sciences Prof. Dr. Meliha ALTUNIŞIK Director I certify that this thesis satisfies all the requirements as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. Prof. Dr. Elvan ALTAN Head of Department This is to certify that we have read this thesis and that in our opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. Assist. Prof. Dr. Sevil Enginsoy Ekinci Supervisor Examining Committee Members Prof. Dr. Ali Cengizkan (TEDU, ARCH) Assist. Prof. Dr. Sevil Enginsoy Ekinci (METU, AH) Prof. Dr. Elvan Altan (METU, AH) I hereby declare that all information in this document has been obtained and presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct. I also declare that, as required by these rules and conduct, I have fully cited and referenced all material and results that are not original to this work. Name, Last name: Seda Sokullu Signature: iii ABSTRACT WORD, IMAGE & ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIOGRAPHY IN W.G. SEBALD’S AUSTERLITZ (2001) Sokullu, Seda M.A., Department of History of Architecture Supervisor: Assist. Prof. Dr. Sevil Enginsoy September 2015, 266 pages This thesis is an attempt to uncover interaction of interdisciplinary practices in the process of writing architectural histories. For this purpose, it examines W.G. -
Tikkun: WG Sebald''s Melancholy Messianism
Tikkun: W.G. Sebald‘s Melancholy Messianism A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Department of German Studies of the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences By Michael David Hutchins 2011 M.A., University of Cincinnati, 2006 B.A., Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, 2004 B.A. Pensacola Christian College, Pensacola, FL, 2000 Committee Chair: Dr. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Professor University of Cincinnati Abstract Shortly before his death in 2001, W.G. Sebald made what amounts to a mission statement for his literary endeavors under the title ―Ein Versuch der Restitution‖ (An Attempt at Restitution). In this brief address, Sebald maintains that his work can be seen as an attempt to make amends for a history of catastrophe. I argue in this dissertation that Sebald‘s self- appointed and self-proclaimed mission of mending history‘s tragedies corresponds to a view of the modern world as broken and needing redemption that Sebald adopted as he read Max Horkheimer‘s and Theodor Adorno‘s Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment). Sebald came to see the modern world as broken by instrumental reason and in need of redemption. He rejected, however, the strategies others had adopted to realize a better world. Sebald remained estranged from organized religion, eschewed the kinds of political engagement adopted by his contemporaries, and ultimately even refused Horkheimer‘s and Adorno‘s own solution, the application of supposedly ‗healthy‘ reason to counteract instrumental reason. What was left to him was the creation of an idiosyncratic ―literature of restitution‖ which relied on willed association rather than on the discovery of causal relationships to structure the episodic narratives he collected and to reclaim individual histories from the anonymity of a history of calamity.