John Hundley will present "No Time As Now: Temporality and Trauma in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz". Everyone welcome!

The current schedule for the WiP for Term 1 can be found on the departmental website hereLink opens in a new window. There are still spots available if you would like to present - please email me (Chris.Hall.1@warwick.ac.uk) if you are interested in doing so.

Abstract

The German writer W.G. Sebald published what would be his final novel, Austerlitz, in late 2001, a mere three months before his death. A flurry of scholarship then and since has investigated the novel’s preoccupation with melancholy, intertextuality, and parataxis. The theme of time, however, has escaped much critical attention. Drawing on the work of T.W. Adorno and Jean Améry, I contend that Austerlitz supplies a critique of linear time through the perspective of survivor experience. Sebald describes a form of temporal experience that is ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ [Außer-der-Zeit-Sein] of linear, flowing time. Sebald presents this as the outcome of a trauma that is both social and historical in origin: the unnameable totality of the Holocaust across Europe. Given the ongoing violence across the globe today, this analysis finally suggests that we have not yet come to terms with the trauma of history.

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