Traces of Trauma in W. G. Sebald and Christoph Ransmayr
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group; Routledge
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 198
ISBN-13: 9781907975400
Subjects: German fiction, history and criticism; Holocaust, jewish (1939-1945), in literature; Violence in literature
Description: Both W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) and the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr (1954-) were born too late to know directly the violence of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but these traumatic events are a persistent presence in their work. In a series of close readings of key prose texts, Dora Osborne examines the different ways in which the traces of a traumatic past mark their narratives. By focusing on the authors' use of visual and topographical tropes, she shows how blind spots and inhospitable places configure signs of past violence, but, ultimately, resist our understanding. Whilst links between the two authors are well-documented, this book offers the first full-length study of Sebald and Ransmayr and their complicated relation to the traumatic traces of National Socialism. - from book cover.