From Kafka to Sebald Modernism and Narrative Form

by Wilke, Sabine

• ISBN13: 9781628928624
• ISBN10: 162892862X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-09-25
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

This volume is a response to a renewed interest in narrative form in contemporary literary studies, taking up the question of literary narratives and their encounters with modernism and postmodernism within the German-language milieu. Original essays written by scholars of German and Comparative Literature approach the issue of narrative form anew, analyzing the ways in which modernist and postmodernist German-language narratives frame and/or deconstruct historical narratives. Beginning with the German-language modernist author par excellence, Franz Kafka, the volume's essays explore the unique perspective on historical change offered by literature. The authors (Kafka, Kappacher, Goll,
Schnitzler, Menasse, and Wolf, among others) and works interpreted in the essays included here span the period from before World War I to the post-Holocaust, post-Wall present. Individual essays focus on modernism, postmodernism, narrative theory, and autobiography.

Author Biography

Sabine Wilke is Professor of German at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, where she is also associated with European Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her research and teaching interests include modern German literature and culture, intellectual history and theory, and cultural studies. She has written books and articles on body constructions in modern German literature and culture, German unification, the history of German film and theater, contemporary German authors and filmmakers, German colonialism and the overlapping concerns of postcolonialism and ecocriticism.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Kafka, Modernism, and Beyond
Sabine Wilke

I: Kafka's Slippages

Ritardando in Das Schloß
Stanley Corngold

Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" as Allegory of Bourgeois Subject Construction
Imke Meyer

II: Kafka Effects

Hofmannsthal after 1918: The Present as Exile
Jens Rieckmann

Yvan Goll's Die Eurokokke: a Reading Through Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk
Rolf Goebel

III: Narrative Theory

Else Meets Dora: Narratology as a Tool for Illuminating Literary Trauma
Gail Finney

"Das kleine Ich": Robert Menasse and Masculinity in Real Time
Heidi Schlipphacke

Sebald's Encounters with French Narrative
Judith R. Ryan

IV: Autobiography

Gender, Psychoanalysis, and Childhood Autobiography: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster
Lorna Martens

Provisional Existence
Walter H. Sokel