Logo image
Back
Modiano and Sebald: Walking in Another's Footsteps
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Modiano and Sebald: Walking in Another's Footsteps

Steven Ungar
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol.31(2), p.314
06/01/2007
DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1658
url
https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1658View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

This article studies Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997) and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2000) in conjunction with a contemporary literature of diaspora grounded in the extended aftermath of World War II. Both texts straddle fiction and testimonial accounts such as memoirs, letters, and video/audio recordings. In addition, both raise questions with which traditional historians seldom contend, even when they group these questions under the category of memory. What understanding of the recent past might these two narratives promote? What do they imply—individually or as a set—concerning the nature and function of the historical subjectivity that literature can convey? Each in its own way, Dora Bruder and Austerlitz override conventions of literary genre by mixing elements of novel, autobiography, and essay. Accordingly, language becomes a prime point of inquiry in conjunction with the double question most likely to be raised in terms of the historical record: who is writing and to what end or purpose? These questions, in turn, direct inquiry to enunciation and point of view as components of historical subjectivity associated with the literature of a post-World War II diaspora.

Details

Metrics

15 Record Views
Logo image