To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

What is memory? Is it a familial inheritance, a file in the archives, an unanswerable question, a ghost of someone, or something, long dead? And, beyond the “what” of memory, there is also the “how.” How does one gain access to memory? By digging through history books, flipping through family photo albums, daydreaming in solitude, or by listening to the stories of first-hand witnesses? This thesis addresses the above questions in relation to the memorial accounts of the trauma of World War II and the devastation of the Holocaust in W.G. Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz by making use of the theoretical tools provided by Jewish mysticism–– specifically the reparative notion of tikkun, the diagrams of the sefirot, and the act of creation as part of a dialogue between text and image. Although pairing the Kabbalah and a 21st century novel may seem untoward, reading the two together creates a new method for approaching the problem of memory, and the memory of trauma specifically. Memory is therefore understood in this thesis as having three key characteristics: it requires movement (in both an imaginative and physical sense), it is an act of creation, and it allows characters to simultaneously be both one and many–an individual and a collective. Turning to theorizations of Jewish mysticism not only contextualizes Sebald’s ideas within a much older philosophical heritage, but such a turn also helps to reframe questions of the Holocaust and memory within a distinctly Jewish tradition and thereby exposes a new angle for addressing a series of questions that has saturated scholarship since the end of WWII. Reading Sebald within the context of Jewish mysticism opens up productive avenues for understanding the dialectical exchange between the collective and the

The Mystics of Memory: Jewish Mysticism in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz

Critics frequently read W.G. Sebald’s work, and particularly his final novel Austerlitz (2001), through the critical framework of trauma and mourning. Such readings tend to focus on Austerlitz’s inability to retrieve childhood memories that would connect him not only to his own past but also to a collective memory of Jewish trauma. However, rather than representing such temporal divides as a lamentable lack of access to this past, Sebald resignifies them in ways that enable an innovative articulation of the past’s continued relevance in the present. Releasing physical artifacts and architectural spaces from the burden of memorialization, Sebald allows them to function as objects whose materiality inaugurates an affective encounter with the past. Taking seriously the affective engagement with such objects that attest to the past without overdetermining it, these new materialist methodologies enable us to move past static models of historical memory and politicized forgetting.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.39.4.08

Stefanie Boese

Papers

"Forever Just Occurring": Postwar Belatedness in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz