Wunderkammer und Apokalypse: Zu W.G. Sebalds Poetik des Sammelns zwischen Barock und Moderne

Finkelde, Dominik

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0483.2007.00405.x

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Sebald once described himself, just as Walter Benjamin did, not so much as a writer but as a collector (K˛hler, 2000). His texts are repositories, and in an inversion of the classical narratological opposition they are 'showing' rather than 'telling' (' AufzÌhlung' instead of 'ErzÌhlung'): Sebald's writing is based on a poetics of collecting (K˛rte, 2005;Finkelde, 2007). This has to be taken quite literally^Sebald confessed to being an ardent frequenter of junk shops and his writing is the outcome of a process of creative collecting.…”

Section: The Jewish Museum Berlin (2001)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory Museum and Museum Text

Simine¹

2012

Theory, Culture & Society

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In the last 20 years the institution of the museum has gone through a period of redefining its role and its functions in society, its forms of representation, its authority in discourses on the past and its objects. The stated aim of many of the 'memory museums' which were established during this period is to invite reflection on the aestheticization of memory and on the fact that the exhibition is seen as a narrative which is challenging conventional codes of perception. By granting a voice to what has been left out of the dominant discourses of history and of everyday experience, they try to integrate diversified and sometimes even incompatible narratives -a mode of representation that has so far been the domain of art and specifically literature. This contribution argues that it is not only between the museum and the memorial that distinctions between different memory media are getting blurred: examples such as Libeskind's Jewish Museum, which wants to be read as a text, and W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz, which he described as an alternative Holocaust museum, indicate that aspects of intermediality gain importance in the contemporary memorial landscape.

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Section: The Jewish Museum Berlin (2001)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory Museum and Museum Text

Simine¹

2012

Theory, Culture & Society

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W. G. Sebald: The Pleasure and Pain of Beauty

Duttlinger¹

2009

German Life and Letters

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Beauty plays a central but ambivalent role in Sebald's writings. Echoing Kant's aesthetic theory, Sebald's texts emphasise the disinterested and free nature of aesthetic pleasure, but they also argue that this pleasure is increasingly threatened in the modern age, as the human relationship towards nature becomes informed by a desire for domination and exploitation. In a cross-reading of Sebald's literary works and his essays on Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller, this article shows how Sebald's own texts attempt to resist this development. By highlighting the beauty of the natural world, they prepare the ground for renewed appreciation, but also for encounter and compassion. Yet the beauty thus displayed is often situated within the context of suffering and death, and by depicting it, Sebald's texts risk becoming complicit with the very structures which they try to undermine. A similar complicity between pleasure and domination also shapes the realm of man-made artefacts. Sebald's texts attempt to escape this double-bind in passages which abandon conventionally realist representation in favour of more abstract tableaux of beautiful patterns and colours. This movement towards abstraction serves to shield beauty from the dictates of instrumental reason, fostering an aesthetic pleasure which remains open to compassion.Kant's aesthetic theory is a theory of pleasure. In his Kritik der Urteilskraft, he famously divides human pleasure into three categories, distinguishing the enjoyment we derive from the beautiful from the kinds of pleasure created by other experiences, such as the agreeable and the good. 1 As Kant argues, only aesthetic pleasure is truly disinterested, in that it depends neither on the body -on our subjective tastes and preferences, nor on reason -on logical arguments or explanations: Man kann sagen: daß unter allen diesen drei Arten des Wohlgefallens das des Geschmacks am Schönen einzig und allein ein uninteressirtes und freies Wohlgefallen sei; denn kein Interesse, weder das der Sinne, noch das der Vernunft, zwingt den Beifall ab (KdU , p. 210). 2

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The Neobaroque in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: The Recovery of Open Totality Countering Poststructuralism

Kaup

2013

Contemporary Literature

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Wunderkammer und Apokalypse: Zu W.G. Sebalds Poetik des Sammelns zwischen Barock und Moderne

Cited by 3 publications

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Memory Museum and Museum Text

Memory Museum and Museum Text

W. G. Sebald: The Pleasure and Pain of Beauty

The Neobaroque in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: The Recovery of Open Totality Countering Poststructuralism

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