W.G. Sebald's Hybrid Poetics
Description
This book offers a new critical perspective on the perpetual problem of literature's relationship to reality and in particular on the sustained tension between literature and historiography. The scholarly and literary works of W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) serve as striking examples for this discussion, for the way in which they demonstrate the emergence of a new hybrid discourse of literature as historiography.
This book critically reconsiders the claims and aims of historiography by re-evaluating core questions of the literary discourse and by assessing the ethical imperative of literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Guided by an inherently interdisciplinary framework, this book elucidates the interplay of epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical concerns that define Sebald's criticism and fiction. Appropriate to the way in which Sebald's works challenge us to rethink the boundaries between discourses, genres, disciplines, and media, this work proceeds in a methodologically non-dogmatic way, drawing on hermeneutics, semiotics, narratology, and discourse theory. In addition to contextualizing Sebald within postwar literature in German, the book is the first English-language study to consider Sebald's ouvre as a whole.
Of interest for Sebald experts and enthusiasts, literary scholars and historians concerned with the problematic of representing the past.
Reviews / Votes
"Wolff's book does not, however, simply challenge the interested reader to think about Sebald's literary work in a meta-representational way, it also shows the academic reader the advantages of familiarity with his critical work, the benefits of wrestling critically with - as opposed to just paraphrasing - the relevant secondary literature, the insights that come from the careful analysis of manuscript sources, and the creative understanding that derives from close reading, untrammelled by theoretical ideas for which Sebald had little or no time. Wolff has been publishing carefully researched, insightful and authoritative work on Sebald since 2007, but the originality and depth of her excellent new book will raise her into the top echelon of those younger scholars who have made Sebald's life and work one of their primary preoccupations." (Richard Sheppard, Journal of European Studies)More details
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Content
2 - List of Abbreviations [Seite 11]
3 - Introduction [Seite 13]
3.1 - Why W.G. Sebald [Seite 13]
3.1.1 - The Borders of World Literature: Sebald the Author and the Phenomenon [Seite 15]
3.1.2 - International and Transdisciplinary Reception [Seite 26]
3.1.3 - Scope and Method [Seite 31]
4 - Chapter 1 [Seite 45]
4.1 - Literature as Historiography in Context [Seite 45]
4.1.1 - Literature versus Historiography across the Ages [Seite 46]
4.1.2 - Toward a Genealogy of a Present Past [Seite 57]
4.1.3 - Literary Historiography: A Method of Interdiscursive Writing [Seite 59]
4.1.4 - The Building Blocks of a Hybrid Form: Genre, Narration, Structure [Seite 72]
4.1.5 - Overcoming the Obstacles in Representing the Past [Seite 78]
5 - Chapter 2 [Seite 81]
5.1 - Conscious Historiography and the Writer's Conscience [Seite 81]
5.1.1 - Writing on the Border between Literary Studies and Literature [Seite 81]
5.1.2 - Literary Portraits as Self-Portrait: Logis in einem Landhaus [Seite 84]
5.1.3 - From Polemic to Poetics: Luftkrieg und Literatur [Seite 94]
5.1.4 - The Author's Role and the Reader's Engagement [Seite 107]
6 - Chapter 3 [Seite 112]
6.1 - What is (in) an Image? Mimesis, Representability, and Visual History [Seite 112]
6.1.1 - Art and Reality [Seite 112]
6.1.2 - Representing the Holocaust and Photographs of Auschwitz [Seite 124]
6.1.3 - Untangling Fact from Fiction: Sebald's Extratextual Materials [Seite 132]
6.1.4 - Literature as Historiography and Visual History [Seite 155]
6.1.5 - Coda [Seite 160]
7 - Chapter 4 [Seite 162]
7.1 - Chronology and Coincidence in the Narrative Cosmos [Seite 162]
7.1.1 - Outlining the Narrative Frame: From Flow to Tableau [Seite 162]
7.1.2 - Plotting the Text: Simultaneity and Co-Presence of Past, Present, and Future [Seite 167]
7.1.3 - Drawing Parallels: Narrative Dis/Conjuncture and Intratextual Cross-References [Seite 175]
7.1.4 - Revealing Changes: Additions and Subtractions in the Austerlitz Manuscript [Seite 182]
7.1.5 - Uncovering the Past: Restitution through Literary Archaeology [Seite 188]
8 - Chapter 5 [Seite 194]
8.1 - Witness and Testimony in Literary Memory [Seite 194]
8.1.1 - Post-Postmemory: Discourses, Concepts, and Modes of Memory [Seite 197]
8.1.2 - Testimonial Structure: Making Sense of the Past by Making Meaning in the Present [Seite 201]
8.1.3 - Memory's Attributes: Visuality, Physicality, Materiality, Uncertainty [Seite 206]
8.1.4 - Memory's Opposites: Repression and the Crisis of Language [Seite 221]
9 - Chapter 6 [Seite 228]
9.1 - Translation as Metaphor and Conservative Innovation [Seite 228]
9.1.1 - Textual Translation [Seite 229]
9.1.2 - Intermedial, Intratextual, and Intertextual Translation [Seite 238]
9.1.3 - Metaphorical Tanslation [Seite 248]
9.1.4 - Irony of/and Literary Innovation [Seite 250]
9.1.5 - Translation as Context [Seite 256]
10 - Conclusion [Seite 258]
10.1 - Panoramic Outlook [Seite 258]
11 - Bibliography of W.G. Sebald's Primary Works and of Works Cited [Seite 262]
11.1 - I. Primary Sources [Seite 262]
11.2 - II. Primary Texts of W.G. Sebald [Seite 263]
11.2.1 - A. Fictional Prose and Poetry [Seite 263]
11.2.2 - B. English Translations of Sebald's Works [Seite 264]
11.2.3 - C. Works in Translation (cited in this book) [Seite 264]
11.2.4 - D. Literary Criticism, Essays, Biographies, Translations [Seite 264]
11.3 - III. Secondary Literature on W.G. Sebald (cited in this book) [Seite 269]
11.4 - IV. W.G. Sebald-Related/-Inspired Films and Websites [Seite 281]
11.5 - V. Related Primary and Secondary Literature [Seite 281]
12 - Name Index [Seite 291]
13 - Subject Index [Seite 298]
