Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary: Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald (Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature)

This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century -- Conrad, Weiss and Sebald -- it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory, trauma theory and transnational and postcolonial studies, the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature to address not only implied but also various unimplied reading positions that engage history in displaced yet material ways. This book opens new analytical paths for thinking about literary texts as media of historical imagination and conceiving relations between incommensurable historical events and contexts. Challenging overly global and overly local readings alike, the book presents a sophisticated contribution to discussions on how to reform the discipline of comparative literature in the twenty-first century Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary 4 Acknowledgments 7 Contents 11 List of Abbreviations 14 1 Introduction: Comparative Readings in the Twenty-First Century 15 Active Readers and Heterogeneous Audiences 15 Reception Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century 19 Modern Temporal Regime and Heterogeneous Contemporaneity 23 Untimely Questioners 27 Parataxis, Imperial Comparison, Unimplied Readers 32 Contact Narratives 37 Notes 40 Bibliography 44 Part I Outlining the Future: Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands and the Parataxis of History 48 2 Sensory Representations and Untimely Reference in Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands 49 Narrating a Heterogeneous Present 49 Poetics of the Outline 56 Dante in Berlin 62 Senses as Catalysts 68 Immersion and Distance 76 Notes 85 Bibliography 89 3 Coordinates of Comparison in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands 93 Drawing Outlines with Brecht 94 Transmission and Parataxis: Karin Boye and Rosalinde Ossietzky 102 Stepping Outside the Frame: Beyond Europe 109 Reading Weiss after 1989 115 Notes 120 Bibliography 123 Part II “I Would Not Even Invent a Transition.” (Re-)Contextualizing Joseph Conrad 125 4 Imperial Comparison and Postcolonial Reading 126 Conrad’s Heterogeneous Afterlife 126 Active Readers and the Discourse of Civilization 131 A Reader Not Implied? Locating Conrad’s Readers 140 Notes 152 Bibliography 154 5 Conrad as a Bridge 156 “Polish Background” 156 Conrad’s Outsides in Contact 165 Implied, Unimplied, Unwelcome Readers 174 Notes 176 Bibliography 180 Part III Analogy and the Narration of Trauma in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Die Ringe des Saturn 183 6 Repetition and Digression: Sebald’s Narratives of Trauma 184 Transnational Trauma Narratives 184 Poetics of Juxtaposition in Austerlitz 191 Coherence and Digression in Die Ringe des Saturn 200 Notes 209 Bibliography 212 7 Configurations of the Present in Sebald 215 Contact Narratives – Degeneralizing Comparison 216 Melancholic Identification 222 Narrative Offshoots 231 Sebald in the Twenty-First Century 236 Notes 238 Bibliography 242 8 Conclusion: Present Futures 246 Notes 254 Bibliography 254 Index 256 Annotation This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century -- Conrad, Weiss and Sebald -- it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory, trauma theory and transnational and postcolonial studies, the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature to address not only implied but also various unimplied reading positions that engage history in displaced yet material ways. This book opens new analytical paths for thinking about literary texts as media of historical imagination and conceiving relations between incommensurable historical events and contexts. Challenging overly global and overly local readings alike, the book presents a sophisticated contribution to discussions on how to reform the discipline of comparative literature in the twenty-first century Front Matter....Pages i-xv Introduction: Comparative Readings in the Twenty-First Century....Pages 1-33 Front Matter....Pages 35-35 Sensory Representations and Untimely Reference in Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands ....Pages 37-80 Coordinates of Comparison in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands ....Pages 81-112 Front Matter....Pages 113-113 Imperial Comparison and Postcolonial Reading....Pages 115-144 Conrad as a Bridge....Pages 145-171 Front Matter....Pages 173-173 Repetition and Digression: Sebald’s Narratives of Trauma....Pages 175-205 Configurations of the Present in Sebald....Pages 207-237 Conclusion: Present Futures....Pages 239-248 Back Matter....Pages 249-261