1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910459756303321

Autore

Wolff Lynn L.

Titolo

W. G. Sebald's hybrid poetics : literature as historiography / / Lynn L. Wolff

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berlin, [Germany] ; ; Boston, [Massachusetts] : , : De Gruyter, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

3-11-034055-0

3-11-037053-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (312 p.)

Collana

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies, , 1861-8030 ; ; Volume 14

Disciplina

833/.914

Soggetti

Geschichtsschreibung

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction. Why W. G. Sebald -- Chapter 1. Literature as Historiography in Context -- Chapter 2. Conscious Historiography and the Writer's Conscience -- Chapter 3. What is (in) an Image? Mimesis, Representability, and Visual History -- Chapter 4. Chronology and Coincidence in the Narrative Cosmos -- Chapter 5. Witness and Testimony in Literary Memory -- Chapter 6. Translation as Metaphor and Conservative Innovation -- Conclusion. Panoramic Outlook -- Bibliography of W. G. Sebalds Primary Works and of Works Cited -- Name Index -- Subject Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.