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, Bernhard, 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.

IntroductionSabine Wilke:Kafka, Modernism, and BeyondI: Kafka's SlippagesStanley Corngold: Ritardando in Das SchloßImke Meyer:Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" as Allegory of Bourgeois Subject ConstructionII: Kafka EffectsJens Rieckmann:Hofmannsthal after 1918: The Present as ExileRolf Goebel:Yvan Goll's Die Eurokokke: a Reading Through Walter Benjamin's Passagen-WerkIII: Narrative TheoryGail Finney:Else Meets Dora: Narratology as a Tool for Illuminating Literary TraumaHeidi Schlipphacke:"Das kleine Ich": Robert Menasse and Masculinity in Real TimeJudith R. Ryan:Sebald's Encounters with French NarrativeIV: AutobiographyLorna Martens:Gender, Psychoanalysis, and Childhood Autobiography: Christa Wolf's KindheitsmusterWalter H. Sokel:Provisional Existence