Sabine Wilke (editor) - From Kafka to Sebald : modernism and narrative form

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Sabine Wilke and contributors 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

From Kafka to Sebald : modernism and narrative form / edited by Sabine Wilke.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4411-2267-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Narration (Rhetoric) 2. German fiction--19th century--History and criticism. 3. German fiction--20th century--History and criticism. 4. Modernism (Literature) I. Wilke, Sabine, 1957

PN3383.N35F76 2012

833.90923--dc23

2012019025

ISBN: 978-1-4411-0936-1

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

The question of narrative form is crucial to the meaning of cultural artifacts. Unless we carefully analyze the position from which a tale is told and how that perspective evolves in complex ways, we have but a hazy grip on how the narrative unfolds, whose point of view we fully or partially share, which perspectives on the narrated events are presented as truths, and how trustworthy the narrator really is, if at all. Scholars who work on narrative theory and analysis concern themselves with this issue: Wayne Booth in his attempt to understand the rhetoric of irony, Robert Scholes who coined the phrase of the fabulator to designate modernist writers of fiction who shy away from direct representation of the surface of reality, Hayden White in his many studies on the narrative discourse of historical reality, to name just a few milestones in the history of narrative among many others.

In terms of historical coverage, From Kafka to Sebald ties together original scholarship on one of the most important German-language writers from the beginning of the twentieth century, Franz Kafka, with scholarship on his contemporaries and on postwar German-language The notion of writing trauma is crucial to an understanding of postwar German-language fiction in the wake of the Holocaust and will be addressed in several of the essays in this volume.

While there are many individual books and articles written specifically on Franz Kafka and his fiction, this collection of essays brings Kafkas work into conversation not only with his contemporaries, fellow Hapsburg intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler and other writers and artists of the period such as Yvan Goll, but also with contemporary authors that position themselves vis--vis the legacy left by Kafkas writings and in particular his articulations of narrative consciousness. The emphasis in From Kafka to Sebald is on the advancement of narrative form in German-language modernist fiction, not understood as a universal structure, but as the location of an aesthetic and formal struggle with the main issues of the period, with alienation, urban existence, deception, disjointed life experiences, the collapse of the belief in the possibility of an objective articulation of meaning, the role of language, the fictionality of modes of documentation and the presentation of historical material, the fictionality of life and the performance of cultures, and other issues that emphasize the cultural construction of life experiences in modernism. The book approaches the question of narrative via a set of important questions including gender, performance, trauma theory, exile, autobiography and memory in an attempt to establish relevance to ongoing debates. Narrative form in German-language modernist fiction is analyzed from a variety of perspectives that have comparative, deconstructive and historical dimensions. The relevance of the topic of modernism and narrative form rests on the idea that most twentieth-century modernist avant-gardes defined themselves through the critique of narrative as the quintessential form of modern identity and as a category in both aesthetic practice and theory. Narrative theory has experienced a major revival in the course of the last decade, transforming the heritage of structuralist literary narratology into a truly interdisciplinary, transmedial study of narrative practice. The papers collected in this volume investigate how these narrative practices in German-language fiction shape our perception of reality through these lenses.

The essays in this book are dedicated to Richard T. Gray, who turned sixty in July 2012. From Kafka to Sebald is a tribute to the work of this scholar of German literature who has devoted much of his intellectual and critical life to the interpretation of the works of Franz Kafka and, more recently, W. G. Sebald and other contemporary authors of fiction. The essays collected in this volume engage in a conversation with the topics that form the center of Grays intellectual life as a teacher, mentor and scholar. Gray wrote a dissertation on Kafkas aphorisms under the direction of Walter H. Sokel at the University of Virginia. The work was later published as volume 91 in the Studien zur deutschen Literatur with Niemeyer, under the title Rolf Goebel and Clayton Koelb, composed the entries in A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia, an extremely useful and practical tool for students of Kafkas works at all levels.

After a critical study of the science of physiognomics

This volume addresses narratological questions in a variety of formats. The first section on Kafkas Slippages includes two essays that deal with the logic of ministerial action and narrating allegory. In his essay on Ritardando in Das Schlo, Stanley Corngold analyzes the narrative logic of Kafkas novel and shows the complexity faced by any project that tries to map a unified narrative field theory. Corngold sees very little progression in the episodic structure of the work. Particles of Kafkas earlier work are redistributed throughout the novel among various characters and contribute to the failure of assuming a totalizing view of Kafkas narrative that always slips away from itself. In a similar vein, Imke Meyer takes a critical look at Kafkas A Hunger Artist as Allegory of Bourgeois Subject Construction. The outlines of her allegorical reading capture for a moment, in the face of allegorys insistence that the breach between sign and referent cannot be healed, the shifting outlines of one of the texts possible meanings. Meyer contends that Kafka shows us a subject that must consume itself in the very process of its constitution.

The second section deals with Kafka Effects. In his essay on Hofmannsthal after 1918: The Present as Exile, Jens Rieckmann discusses exile in the context of Hugo von Hofmannsthals understanding of the loss of the k.u.k (kaiserlich und kniglichimperial and regal) monarchy and his alienated existence in the Austrian Republic. Rieckmann reads Hofmannsthals artistic crisis as a mode of exile compared to the creative output of his youth. In Yvan Golls Die Eurokokke: A Reading Through Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk, Rolf Goebel shows that although neither work influenced the composition of the other, Benjamins monumental compilation of citations and reflections on Paris as the capital of European modernity in the age of high capitalism can serve as an interpretive framework for a new reading of Golls rather neglected novel. The comparison of Benjamins and Golls texts helps elucidate the complex range of intellectual responses to the cultural crisis of interwar Europe.