Anachronism and Anatopism in the Prose-Fiction of W.G. Sebald Público

Abstract

Each of three W.G. Sebald texts, Vertigo, The Emigrants, and Austerlitz, comprises journeys, which travel backwards into the past and across time and place. Vertigo is a pilgrimage for the narrators, which begins with Beyle and Napoleon and their transalpine expedition, and ends with a dream of the end of time, a realm of "darkened skies" and a "jagged wall of fire," through which the narrator continues his eternal wandering. In The Emigrants, the four characters journey into exile and displacement. Austerlitz, lastly, is an iterative and circular journey, perhaps two parallel journeys, which lead to inaccessible memories and irresolvable dilemmas. I argue that in Sebald's works of prose fiction is a sort of underlying structure and narrative generator that can be said to determine and control otherwise absurd coincidences of time and place. The evidence that such a structure of relations exists is generated by images produced in the interaction of the text with photographs and other visual documents. In Vertigo, the text-image interaction produces a sense of time, or the loss of time. In The Emigrants, place, or loss of place. Finally, in Austerlitz, Sebald collapses time and place to construct a thesis on the failure of writing and the trauma of writing.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction................................................1-4

II. Time........................................................5-32

III. Place....................................................33-67

IV. Writing..................................................68-83

V. Conclusion..............................................84-86

VI. Bibliography...........................................87-88

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Comparative Literature
Degree	BA
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, Comparative
Palavra-chave	Austerlitz Barthes Text Identity Fiction Comparative Literature Kafka Sebald Structuralism WWII Narrator German Anachronism Emigrant German Literature Jewish Trauma Memory Literary Theory Modernity Holocaust Prose-Fiction Stendhal Nabokov Photography Image Anatopism Death Literary Analysis Writing
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Bennington, Geoffrey, Emory University
Committee Members	Crawford, Christina Elizabeth, Emory University White, Deborah Elise, Emory University

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