From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form

This volume is a response to a renewed interest in narrative form in contemporary literary studies, taking up the question of literary narratives and their encounters with modernism and postmodernism within the German-language milieu. Original essays written by scholars of German and Comparative Literature approach the issue of narrative form anew, analyzing the ways in which modernist and postmodernist German-language narratives frame and/or deconstruct historical narratives. Beginning with the German-language modernist author par excellence, Franz Kafka, the volume's essays explore the unique perspective on historical change offered by literature. The authors (Kafka, Kappacher, Goll,
Schnitzler, Menasse, and Wolf, among others) and works interpreted in the essays included here span the period from before World War I to the post-Holocaust, post-Wall present. Individual essays focus on modernism, postmodernism, narrative theory, and autobiography.

“This collection of articles, written by well-known scholars, contributes to a literary analysis of historical practices without neglecting the aesthetic aspects. It illuminates various genres and demonstrates how narratives reflect societal practices symbolically and directly and how community norms are constituted and unconsciously internalized. On the whole, this useful collection serves the current interest in narration, as it brings together a number of different examples of literary interpretations in postmodern times from the genre point of view.”- Helga W. Kraft, University of Illinois at Chicago

Sabine Wilke is Professor of German at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, where she is also associated with European Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her research and teaching interests include modern German literature and culture, intellectual history and theory, and cultural studies. She has written books and articles on body constructions in modern German literature and culture, German unification, the history of German film and theater, contemporary German authors and filmmakers, German colonialism and the overlapping concerns of postcolonialism and ecocriticism.

Introduction: Kafka, Modernism, and Beyond
Sabine Wilke, University of Washington, USA

I: Kafka's Slippages

Ritardando in Das Schloß
Stanley Corngold, Princeton University, USA

Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" as Allegory of Bourgeois Subject Construction
Imke Meyer, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

II: Kafka Effects

Hofmannsthal after 1918: The Present as Exile
Jens Rieckmann, University of California, Irvine, USA

Yvan Goll's Die Eurokokke: a Reading Through Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk
Rolf Goebel, University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA

III: Narrative Theory

Else Meets Dora: Narratology as a Tool for Illuminating Literary Trauma
Gail Finney, University of California, Davis, USA

"Das kleine Ich": Robert Menasse and Masculinity in Real Time
Heidi Schlipphacke, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Sebald's Encounters with French Narrative
Judith R. Ryan, Harvard University, USA

IV: Autobiography

Gender, Psychoanalysis, and Childhood Autobiography: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster
Lorna Martens, University of Virginia, USA

Provisional Existence
Walter H. Sokel, USA