Narrative Prose since 1989

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Narrative Prose since 1989
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Literaturstreite of the 1990s

• 1. Critique of Gesinnungsästhetik
• Accusation that value of literature in West and
  East Germany based on moral categories rather
  than aesthetic values.
• What should literature be about? Political or
  apolitical?
• A high culture debate.

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Tendencies of post-89 literature

• Pop-Literatur style over substance.
• Earlier pop-literature of 1960s/70s contrast
  of high / low culture
• Reflecting a consumer-driven, globalized society
  (reflecting upon?). Influenced by Brett Easton
  Ellis etc.
• Christian Kracht, Faserland (1995)

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Pop- Literatur

• Benjamin Stuckrad-Barre, Soloalbum (1999)

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Tendencies of post-89 literature

• Memories, be it in the form of Ostalgie, or,
  more recently, Westalgie.
• Reflecting dominance of memory discourses in
  contemporary society. A reaction against the
  dominance of the virtual image and the commodity.
  The need for the reassurance of the auratic power
  of memories in a globalized world.
• But memory is not straightforward in Germany.

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Literaturstreite of the 1990s

• 2. Luftkrieg und Literatur (1997)
• Sebald accused post-war literature of not dealing
  adequately with the WWII bombing campaigns in
  Germany. Reflected a general taboo and refusal to
  remember (cf. Katz und Maus)
• Failure of traditional fictional methods to
  represent traumatic experience.

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Germans as Victims ?

• Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang (2003)
• Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand (2002)
• To what extent can Germans also be seen as
  victims of the horrors of the 20th century, not
  simply one of the perpetrators?
  (Wehrmachtausstellung)
• Is Die Ausgewanderten an ethically legitimate
  exercise?

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W.G. Sebald

• (1944-2001) Born in Germany, died in England
• Die Ausgewanderten (1992), Die Ringe des Saturn
  (1995) and Austerlitz (2000)
• Only Austerlitz is a novel in the traditional
  sense.

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Forms and Themes of 20th century narrative prose

• Homelessness / Marginal Figures
• Ecological entropy industrial decline the
  failed promises of modernity
• The individual as victim of (traumatic)
  socio-political historical processes
• How to tell these stories? Search for a stable
  perspective which he recognizes as illusory (cf.
  Koeppen)
• Formal innovation testing the limits of fiction.
  Literature lives by exposing and criticizing its
  own limits (J. Culler).

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• Sebalds books look back over the twentieth
  century and its history.
• First-person narrator, very close to Sebald
  himself, who did not experience much of the
  history he describes.
• Questions the importance of memory, how it is
  passed on, but also its reliability.

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Die Ausgewanderten

• Here, it is not enough to say that the book is
  autobiographical. Die Ausgewanderten, as a set
  of biographies, is concerned with the
  relationship between the self and the other,
  between the writer and his object about whom he
  is telling stories.
• Sebald always insisted that his narrators were
  fictional.
• Is narrative a fundamental form of knowledge
  (giving knowledge of the world through its
  sense-making) or is it a rhetorical structure
  that distorts as much as it reveals? Is narrative
  a source of knowledge or illusion? (J. Culler,
  p. 94)

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Focus Max Aurach

• What is the formal effect and what are the
  thematic reasons why the narrator reproduces the
  memories of Luisa Lanzberg?
• What is the image of contemporary Germans and
  Germany in this story?
• Find examples of the self-reflexive use of
  photographs in this story. What does this suggest
  about the use of photographs in the book?