Search

W.G. Sebald's private library, which is held in part in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, contains a copy of Walter Benjamin's Illuminationen. This essay seeks to establish a theoretical framework for Sebald's narrative technique by investigating his annotations in the closing essay of the book, "The Narrator". With the help of his underlinings and marginalia, Sebald's own narrative structures can be interpreted as a means of depicting "natural history", as an aesthetic response to a philosophical concept. Two principles can be derived from this perspective: the strategy of "interlocking layers" (Einschachteln), and the strategy of montage. It is the dialectic between these two principles that drives Sebald's prose style. The tension in his work between fact and fiction derives ultimately from an uneasy relationship between his artfully constructed prose-style on the one hand and its quasi-documentary realism on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instead of tracing intertextual references in Bernhard's œuvre, this essay reads his inventories as "corpora"—"ectopic" entities—that disrupt conventional systems of narration and orders of knowledge. Taking into account the persistent materiality of writing, the essay identifies the narrator of Amras as a "floating organ," a textual (out)growth that traces the corporeal topography of Bernhard's narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]