Thesis (M.A,)--George Mason University, 2008. / Vita: p. 45. Thesis director: David Kaufmann. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 11, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 42-44). Also issued in print.

This dissertation investigates two of W.G. Sebald’s novels, "Die Ausgewanderten" and "Austerlitz" as examples of a unique kind of Holocaust fiction by a non-Jewish German author. Sebald’s fiction represents a radically different German depiction of the Holocaust and its effects on Jewish victims, as it deconstructs critical discourse and debates about the Holocaust in Germany, establishing an ethical approach to Jewish suffering and the idea of coming to terms with the Nazi past in the German context. Through the narrative structure, ambiguity and the language of the German narrators, what I term its language of uncertainty, Sebald’s fiction avoids appropriating the Jewish voice as well as identifying with Jewish Holocaust victims and survivors, while giving voice to the underrepresented Jewish perspective in contemporary German literature. In addition, this dissertation examines competing discourses on representation, victimization and memory in regard to the Nazi past and views Sebald’s work as a critical response to these discussions. Indeed, Sebald’s fiction moves the discussion beyond the trope of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“mastery of the past”), which has for so long dominated discussion of the Holocaust in Germany, towards a reconsideration of the victims, whose voice has been marginalized in the focus on the non-Jewish German handling of the Nazi past. / text

Wien, Univ., Dipl.-Arb., 2008.

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

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisor: Monika Shafi, Women's Studies Program. Includes bibliographical references.

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

No description available.

No description available.

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

Novel: Fragments of a Former Moon The novel Fragments of a Former Moon (FFM) invokes the paradoxical earlier death of the still-living protagonist. The unmarried German woman is told that her skeletal remains have been discovered in Israel, thirty-eight years since her body was interred in 1967. This absurd premise raises issues of representing death in contemporary culture; death's destabilising effect on the individual's textual representation; post-Enlightenment dissolution of the modern rational self; and problems of mimetic post- Holocaust representation. Using W G Sebald's fiction as a point of departure, FFM's photographic illustrations connote modes of textual representation that disrupt the autobiographical self, invoking mortality and its a-temporal (representational) displacement. As with Sebald's recurring references to the Holocaust, FFM depicts a psychologically unstable protagonist seeking to recover repressed memories of an absent past. Research dissertation: Metonymy &Trauma: Re-presenting Death in the Literature of W. G. Sebald. The dissertation centres on the effect of metonymy in the rhetoric of textually-constructed identity and its contemporary representation in the face of death. I concentrate on the effect of Holocaust trauma on representation and memory, relating trauma theory to the metonymy of W G Sebald's fiction, and situating representations of the traumatised self within the institution of modern bureaucracy. Using Ronald Schleifer's theory of metonymy I explore the rhetorical process by which Sebald seeks to depict the unrepresentable within Holocaust history, arguing that Sebald's correlation of text with image evokes problems of Holocaust discourse because it re-presents the past while recognising inadequacies within conventional narrative. Photography's function as an indexical trace of the past grounds my account of Sebald's use of imagery in questioning conventional forms of representation. I argue that Sebald construes the institutionalised constitution of the modern self through civic architecture, emphasising the metonymical associations of contemporary Western life and death. I maintain ultimately that the ethically displaced modern self typifies a culture capable of committing - and simultaneously repressing the representation - of technologised mass genocide: Sebald's texts critique modern society by apprehending modes of intersubjective memory and narrative responsibility through acknowledgement of the arbitrary, indexical capacity of metonymical representation.