PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2011, Arts and Sciences: Germanic Languages and Literature

Shortly before his death in 2001, W.G. Sebald made what amounts to a mission statement for his literary endeavors under the title “Ein Versuch der Restitution” (An Attempt at Restitution). In this brief address, Sebald maintains that his work can be seen as an attempt to make amends for a history of catastrophe. I argue in this dissertation that Sebald's self-appointed and self-proclaimed mission of mending history's tragedies corresponds to a view of the modern world as broken and needing redemption that Sebald adopted as he read Max Horkheimer's and Theodor Adorno's Dialektik der Aufklarung (Dialectic of Enlightenment). Sebald came to see the modern world as broken by instrumental reason and in need of redemption. He rejected, however, the strategies others had adopted to realize a better world. Sebald remained estranged from organized religion, eschewed the kinds of political engagement adopted by his contemporaries, and ultimately even refused Horkheimer's and Adorno's own solution, the application of supposedly ‘healthy' reason to counteract instrumental reason. What was left to him was the creation of an idiosyncratic “literature of restitution” which relied on willed association rather than on the discovery of causal relationships to structure the episodic narratives he collected and to reclaim individual histories from the anonymity of a history of calamity. This vision of a redemptive function for literature grew out of one of his early academic fascinations: the German-Jewish messianic discourse, particularly as it found expression in the work of Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and Franz Kafka. I will argue that Sebald's concept of the messiah, developed in his scholarly pursuits, played itself out in his imaginative literature as the adopting of a melancholic register. The paradoxical sensibility of hopeful despondency characterized a number of German-Jewish thinkers in the first quarter of the 20th century, all of whom informed, to one degree (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sara Friedrichsmeyer PhD (Committee Chair); Katharina Gerstenberger PhD (Committee Member); Harold Herzog PhD (Committee Member) Subjects:

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2009, Arts and Sciences : Germanic Languages and Literature

„W.G. Sebalds Nach der Natur. Ein Elementargedicht“ bemuht sich, die Missverstandnisse und Verwirrungen, die sich im Laufe der Zeit um das Elementargedicht Nach der Natur in der Sekundarliteratur uber den Text angesammelt haben, aufzulosen. Bis zu dieser Arbeit blieb die Sebald-Forschung dem Gedicht eine genaue Analyse schuldig. In der Einleitung wird nicht nur die kurze Rezeptionsgeschichte des Gedichtes Nach der Natur behandelt, sondern weiterhin auch die Entstehungsgeschichte. Dabei wird die originale Greno-Publikation von 1988 verwendet, die ebenfalls eine Erlauterung der Photographien des Munchener Photographen Thomas Becker beinhaltet. Das Kapitel „Sebalds Grunewald“ bemuht sich, zum einen der Intertextualitat Sebalds in Nach der Natur auf die Spur zukommen und weiterhin eine verstandliche Interpretation der Ergebnisse anzubieten. Es wird dabei deutlich, dass Sebald sich in diesem Abschnitt nicht nur auf die Forschung uber Grunewald vor, sondern auch nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg stutzt, und sie folglich kontrastiert. Durch diese Vorgehensweise ist es dem Autor moglich, eine nicht nur von unserer Gegenwart entfernte historische Gestalt in Form des Malers des Isenheimer Altares in unsere heutige Realitat zu integrieren. Einer ahnlichen Vorgehensweise wird in dem Kapitel „Sebalds Steller“ nachgegangen. Dabei wird wahrend der Analyse der Intertextualitat klar, dass sich Sebald in diesem Teil auf den amerikanischen Autoren Corey Ford und seine fiktionale Biographie uber Steller mit dem Titel Where the Sea Breaks Its Back aus dem Jahre 1967 stutzt. Abschließend wird die Frage erhoben, ob es sich dabei weiterhin um eine Referenz zu dem Kalten Krieg handeln konnte. Die in den ersten zwei Teilen von Nach der Natur erarbeitete Vorgehensweise und Analyse der Intertextualitat Sebalds muss im vorletzten Kapitel dieser Arbeit mit der Uberschrift „Sebalds Alter Ego“ adaptiert werden. Es kann gezeigt werden, dass der Erzahler eine Art Alter Ego des Autors darstellt und mit (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sara Friedrichsmeyer PhD (Committee Chair); Manfred Zimmermann PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Todd Herzog PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: German literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Arts and Sciences : Germanic Languages and Literature

During the past two decades, a vast body of German literature has appeared that is interested not only in the Holocaust but also in the way Germans have dealt with the legacy of National Socialism over the last sixty years. Especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification, a number of literary works have appeared that use photographs to approach this limit-event and its remembrance in German national and private discourses. At the same time, the scholarly attention given to questions of memory and its representation has also sharply increased over the last few decades. Such debates have brought forth a number of demands in order for Holocaust literature to become productive for remembrance as well as for the creation of the present and the future. The following study investigates works by Monika Maron, W. G. Sebald, and Irina Liebmann. Of particular interest is the question of how these authors have integrated photographs within their texts in order to address and overcome the problems of Holocaust representation: the generational distance, absences and silences as well as the institutionalization and instrumentalization of memory. The first chapter lays out the theoretical framework that informs the discussion of the most vital concepts treated in this study: fact and fiction, history and memory, photography and text. The subsequent three chapters investigate the respective works written by the three authors: Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe (1999), W. G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), and Irina Liebmann's Stille Mitte von Berlin (2002). I maintain that the complex and paradoxical nature of photography, most significantly its simultaneous claim to truth and to deception, renders it a particularly fruitful means to negotiate questions of factuality and fiction as well as memory and history. It allows these authors to engage the reader in a problematization of the concept of truth as well as the constructedness of all f (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Katharina Gerstenberger (Committee Chair); Dr. Sara Friedrichsmeyer (Other); Dr. Todd Herzog (Other); Dr. Richard Schade (Other) Subjects:

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2004, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Architecture (Master of)

This thesis situates itself in the middle ground between literature and architecture and explores the process of translating from one to the other. The ultimate objective is to memorialize the author W.G. Sebald by translating his novel The Rings of Saturn into an architectural project. The thesis analyzes three precedent architectural projects that were based on literary works, and uses this analysis to condition the approach to an architectural translation of Sebald's novel. The approach focuses on the narrative structure of the novel, primarily Sebald's use of repetition, as a basis for the translation. Layered onto this underlying structure are certain semantic and thematic elements from the novel intended to infuse the project with multiple levels of meaning. This project, “The Sebald Centre for Literary Translation,” is located at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, where Sebald taught from 1970 until the time of his death in 2001.

Committee: David Niland (Advisor) Subjects: Architecture