Journal ArticleDOI
"Forever Just Occurring": Postwar Belatedness in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz
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Sebald's final novel Austerlitz as mentioned in this paper resignifies these temporal divides in ways that enable an innovative articulation of the past's continued relevance in the present, allowing physical artifacts and architectural spaces to function as objects whose materiality inaugurates an affective encounter with the past.Abstract:
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.read more
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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality
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The Mystics of Memory: Jewish Mysticism in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose to read 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.
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Dialectic of Enlightenment
Max Horkheimer,Theodor W. Adorno +1 more
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