W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald PDF Author: Jonathan James Long
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231145121
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Uses the problem of modernity to explore various themes in Sebald's work.

W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald PDF Author: Jonathan James Long
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231145121
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Uses the problem of modernity to explore various themes in Sebald's work.

W. G. Sebald - Image, Archive, Modernity

W. G. Sebald - Image, Archive, Modernity PDF Author: J .J. Long
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 074863388X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
W. G. Sebald is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant writers to have emerged onto the global literary scene in recent decades, and is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Nabokov, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Proust, and Primo Levi. W. G. Sebald-Image, Archive, Modernity offers a unique and original reading of Sebald's dazzling oeuvre, arguing that his work is concerned first and foremost with the problem of modernity. It focuses in particular on the numerous archival institutions and processes that lie at the very heart of modernity and are repeatedly thematised throughout Sebald's work.Adopting a broad definition of the archive to encompass a wide range of material practices, the book analyses the function of photography, museums, libraries, and other systems of knowledge to which Sebald's texts obsessively return. Following Foucault, such systems are seen as central to the exercise of power and the constitution of subjectivity in modernity. By undertaking a differentiated analysis that is attuned to the formal complexities of Sebald's texts, this book shows that Sebald's engagement with structures of power-knowledge is characterised by a melancholy struggle to assert autonomous selfhood in the face of the institutional and discursive determinants of subjectivity.

Austerlitz

Austerlitz PDF Author: W.G. Sebald
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0679645411
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. “Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity. This tenth-anniversary edition features a new Introduction by James Wood.

The Novel in German since 1990

The Novel in German since 1990 PDF Author: Stuart Taberner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139499882
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Diversity is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary German-language literature, not just in terms of the variety of authors writing in German today, but also in relation to theme, form, technique and style. However, common themes emerge: the Nazi past, transnationalism, globalisation, migration, religion and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and identity. This book presents the novel in German since 1990 through a set of close readings both of international bestsellers (including Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz) and of less familiar, but important texts (such as Yadé Kara's Selam Berlin). Each novel discussed in the volume has been chosen on account of its aesthetic quality, its impact and its representativeness; the authors featured, among them Nobel Prize winners Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller demonstrate the energy and quality of contemporary writing in German.

Libraries, Literatures, and Archives

Libraries, Literatures, and Archives PDF Author: Sas Mays
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135013845
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Not only does the library have a long and complex history and politics, but it has an ambivalent presence in Western culture – both a site of positive knowledge and a site of error, confusion, and loss. Nevertheless, in literary studies and in the humanities, including book history, the figure of the library remains in many senses under-researched. This collection brings together established and up-and-coming researchers from a number of practices – literary and cultural studies, gender studies, book history, philosophy, visual culture, and contemporary art –with an effective historical sweep ranging from the time of Sumer to the present day. In the context of the rise of archive studies, this book attends specifically and meta-critically to the figure of the library as a particular archival form, considering the traits that constitute (or fail to constitute) the library as institution or idea, and questions its relations to other accumulative modes, such as the archive in its traditional sense, the museum, or the filmic or digital archive. Across their diversity, and in addition to their international standard of research and writing, each chapter is unified by commitment to analyzing the complex cultural politics of the library form.

Landscape and Subjectivity in the Work of Patrick Keiller, W. G. Sebald, and Iain Sinclair

Landscape and Subjectivity in the Work of Patrick Keiller, W. G. Sebald, and Iain Sinclair PDF Author: David Anderson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019884719X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This book situates the film-maker Patrick Keiller alongside the writers W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair as the three leading voices in 'English psychogeography', offering new insights to key works including London, The Rings of Saturn, and Lights Out for the Territory. Excavating social and political contexts while also providing plentiful close analysis, it examines the cultivation of a distinctive 'affective' mode or sensibility especially attuned to the cultural anxieties of the twentieth century's closing decades. Landscape and Subjectivity explores motifs including essayism, the reconciliation of creativity with market forces, and the foregrounding of an often agonised or melancholic. It asks whether the work can, collectively, be seen to constitute a 'critical theory of contemporary space' and suggests that Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair's contributions represent a highly significant moment in English culture's engagement with landscape, environment, and itself. The book's analyses are fuelled by archival and topographical research and are responsive to various interdisciplinary contexts, including the tradition of the 'English Journey', the set of ideas associated with the 'spatial turn', critical theory, the so-called 'heritage debate', and more recent theorisation of the 'anthropocene'.

W.G. Sebald’s Hybrid Poetics

W.G. Sebald’s Hybrid Poetics PDF Author: Lynn L. Wolff
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110340550
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book 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 œuvre as a whole. Of interest for Sebald experts and enthusiasts, literary scholars and historians concerned with the problematic of representing the past.

Traces of Trauma in W. G. Sebald and Christoph Ransmayr

Traces of Trauma in W. G. Sebald and Christoph Ransmayr PDF Author: Dora Osborne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351192337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
"Both W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) and the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr (1954-) were born too late to know directly the violence of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but these traumatic events are a persistent presence in their work. In a series of close readings of key prose texts, Dora Osborne examines the different ways in which the traces of a traumatic past mark their narratives. By focusing on the authors' use of visual and topographical tropes, she shows how blind spots and inhospitable places configure signs of past violence, but, ultimately, resist our understanding. Whilst links between the two authors are well-documented, this book offers the first full-length study of Sebald and Ransmayr and their complicated relation to the traumatic traces of National Socialism. Dora Osborne is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham."

Archive and Memory in German Literature and Visual Culture

Archive and Memory in German Literature and Visual Culture PDF Author: Dora Osborne
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139230
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Explores the changing relationship between memory and the archive in German-language literature and culture since 1945.

Memory, Intermediality, and Literature

Memory, Intermediality, and Literature PDF Author: Sara Tanderup Linkis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429557221
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
"If readers of Sara Tanderup Linkis’ "Something to hold on to ..." open the book in the expectation of entering a niche of literature and literary studies, they will leave it after having encountered a new highway in literature. Here, the traditional theme of memory and the most recent use of digital media merge into a new understanding of the role of the book in the contemporary media landscape and of vicissitudes of memorial processes literature, which also offers a broader perspective on literature in human history. Spurred by Sara Tanderup Linkis’ sharp eye the readings of texts are lucid, engaging and offers so many ideas that teachers will renew their curricula, and readers will open the internet for more or rush to the library." — Svend Erik Larsen, professor emeritus Memory, Intermediality, and Literature investigates how selected literary works use intermedial strategies to represent and perform cultural memory. Drawing on the theoretical perspectives of cultural memory studies, this engaging, reader-friendly monograph examines new materialism and intermediality studies, analyzying works by Alexander Kluge, W.G. Sebald, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anne Carson, Mette Hegnhøj, William Joyce, J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The works emerge out of different traditions and genres, ranging from neo-avant-garde montages through photo-novels and book objects to apps and children’s stories. In this new monograph, Sara Tanderup Linkis presents an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, reading the works together, across genres and decades, and combining the perspectives of memory studies and materialist and media-oriented analysis. This approach makes it possible to argue that the works not only use intermedial strategies to represent memory, but also to remember literature, reflecting on the changing status and function of literature as a mediator of cultural memory in the age of new media. Thus, the works may be read as reactions to modern media culture, suggesting the ways in which literature and memory are affected by new media and technologies – photography and television as well as iPads and social media.