The purpose of this thesis is to examine the aesthetic structure and components of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz and to show their reciprocal relationship to ethical forms of remembrance for the present and the future. The goal of this project is to explain how fiction may be utilized as a means of meaningful engagement with points of traumatic memory for the purpose of maintaining viable connections to the past across time. The first chapter deals explicitly with the novel’s overall structure and its relation to philosophical forms of thought that facilitate a practical connection to the past through fiction. The next chapter examines the use of refracted or indirect narration as an aesthetic component of this process. The final chapter constitutes an investigation of photography as a structure in this aesthetic that lends itself to the overall obliqueness I see as necessary to the ethics of representation embodied in Austerlitz. / Graduate / 0311

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W.G. Sebald’s final novel Austerlitz is often framed as a work of “postmemorial” Holocaust fiction. While trauma theory has generated valuable insights about the novel, its emphasis on witnessing (or failing to bear witness) tends to elide other important aspects of the text, most notably the careful attention Austerlitz brings to bear on physical things, spaces, and structures. This essay draws on recent work in object-oriented philosophy to suggest a new theoretical framework for reading Sebald’s last novel. Taking Austerlitz’s meticulous descriptions of the physical world as my starting point, I trace how the text cultivates what Jane Bennett calls a “vital materialism,” or a theory of matter that attends to the vitality of nonhuman objects. Instead of reading ‘through’ these descriptions for what goes unrepresented (“the main scenes of horror,” in Sebald’s phrase), I examine how the novel’s attention to physical surfaces troubles the distinction between material things and immaterial processes like subjectivity, memory, and affective response. Viewed in this light, I suggest that we might understand Sebald’s ‘surface readings’ not as a failure to get beyond the surface to the depths, but as part of an alternative archival practice—one that facilitates, in turn, different modes of ethical engagement. / text

The area of the former barracks lies near Sokolnice falling into the periphery of Brno. It is a picturesque village that has a rich history. The barracks are located on a hill called Stará hora, there are several cadastral areas. Near the building, we can find a radar that manages the nearby Brno airport, or the Peace Mound built on the Prateck Hill, soldiers fall to remembrance. The design principle was based on the given operation and its related functions. Dining room, rehabilitation, barber, pedicure, buffet and, last but not least, a multifunctional hall with a small library. The destruction of the unnecessary transformer station and the replenishment of the mass was a logical solution to the situation. It is an assembled reinforced concrete frame 8x8m. Inside the half-block we find a terrace with a pool, which is trying to create a specific microclimate and humidify the surroundings. The pool also serves as a retention tank and the house effectively manages rainwater. Within the lifetime, because of the corrosion of reinforced concrete and the unclear condition of the structure, I designed the exterior cladding to demolish and build a new cladding, a brick made of ceramic blocks. The house is designed in a minimalist spirit and cooperates with the greenery in its surroundings. Especially in long-distance views of integration into the landscape, this greenery is valued. The spirit of place in heavy air bears a strange whiff of dragging death that, when thinking about the history of a place, froze and freezes ... so perhaps while resting before the last journey ... that house discourages and breathes a little life into dying ...

Zugl.: Bonn, Universiẗat, Diss., 2006.

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The screen, as recent studies in a number of fields indicate, is a cultural object due for critical reappraisal. Work on the theoretical status of screen objects tends to focus upon the materialisation of surface; in other words, it attempts to rethink the relationship between the supposedly 'superficial' facade and the 'functional' object itself. I suggest that this work, while usefully chipping away at the dichotomy between the 'superficial' and the 'functional', can lead us to a more radical conclusion when read in the context of subjectivity. By rethinking the relationship between the surface and the obverse face of the screen as the terms of a dialectic, we can ‘read’ the screen as the vital component in a process which constitutes the Subject. In order to demonstrate this, I analyse productions of subjectivity in literary texts of the twenty-first century — in doing so, I assume the novel as nonpareil arena of the dramatisation of subjectivity — and I propose a reading of the work of Jacques Lacan as hitherto unacknowledged theorist par excellence of the form and function of the screen. Lacan describes, with the function of desire and the formation of the screen of fantasy, the primary position this ‘screen-form' inhabits in the constitution of the Subject. Lacan’s work forms a critical juncture through which we must proceed if we are to properly read and understand the chosen texts: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber; The Tain by China Miéville; Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. In each text, I analyse the particular materialisations of the screen and interrogate the constitution of the subject and the locus of desire. By analysing the vicissitudes of subjectivity in these texts, I make a claim for the study of the screen as constituting a central question in the field of contemporary literature.

Le peintre, soldat et mémorialiste Louis-François Lejeune (1775-1848) entendait faire de son corpus de peintures de bataille et de ses Souvenirs d’un officier de l’Empire (1851) des témoignages historiques de la période napoléonienne, destinés à la postérité. Or, cette conjugaison entre peintures et mémoires renvoie aussi à la dualité médiale de la propagande napoléonienne, qui diffuse un récit unique des événements militaires à l’aide d’organes d’information inédits tels que les Bulletins de la Grande Armée. Ce récit, déjà médiatisé comme étant historique, est repris en images par le mécénat impérial. Ce mémoire vise à démontrer comment Lejeune contribue à ce récit historicisant, d’abord à un niveau individuel en construisant son identité par rapport à sa participation aux guerres napoléoniennes, puis aussi à un niveau étatique. Son Bivouac d’Austerlitz, présenté au Salon de 1808, est une commande du gouvernement. Il sera question de la façon dont ce tableau de Lejeune s’insère d’abord dans sa carrière, ensuite dans son corpus de peintures de bataille, puis finalement dans le récit napoléonien sur Austerlitz. La forme épisodique du tableau, empruntée à la ligne narrative du 30e bulletin de la Grande Armée, où Napoléon rapporte la victoire d’Austerlitz, peut s’expliquer par la complémentarité voulue entre récit textuel et visuel. Ce tableau contribue ainsi à la construction historique de la bataille. Au milieu des transformations profondes du monde académique et de la hiérarchie des genres, la dualité peintre-soldat de Lejeune répond en tous points à la vocation historique attribuée à la peinture sous Napoléon. / Painter, soldier, and memorialist Louis-François Lejeune (1775-1848) conceived his battle paintings and his memoirs, Souvenirs d’un officier de l’Empire (1851), as historical testimonies of the Napoleonic period, destined for posterity. This twinning of paintings and memoirs mirrors the duality of Napoleonic propaganda as a whole, which disseminates a single version of military events with the help of unprecedented information tools such as the Bulletins de la Grande Armée. This written narrative, already thought of as historical, is picked up again in the paintings commissioned by the government. This master’s thesis argues that Lejeune contributes in a unique way to this historical narrative, first at an individual level by constructing his identity from his participation in the Napoleonic wars, and also at a state level. His Bivouac d’Austerlitz, presented at the 1808 Salon, was commissioned by the government as part of a larger order. It is shown that this painting fits first into Lejeune’s career, then into his cycle of battle paintings, and finally into the narrative of Austerlitz that Napoleon himself promoted. The episodic form of this painting can be explained by the deliberate pairing of written and pictorial narratives, which borrows from the 30th bulletin de la Grande Armée where Napoleon recounts the victory at Austerlitz. This painting thus contributes to the historical construction of the battle. As deep transformations threatened the academic genre hierarchy at the turn of the nineteenth century, the duality of Lejeune’s persona as soldier and painter helped promote the historical function given to paintings under Napoleon.