Conference "What is the Contemporary?"
St Andrews University School of Modern Languages
Institute for Contemporary and Comparative Literature(ICCL)
1-3 September 2014
Kaisa Kaakinen, Ph.D.
Department of Comparative Literature
University of Turku, Finland
Title: Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald, and the Pressure of the Present
Panel: 'Contemporary' Literature
Is literature contemporary whenread by readers, who belong to the same time with the author? What does it mean to belong to the same time? My presentation will complicate these notionsby comparing the literary work of two German-language authors Peter Weiss (1916-1982) and W. G. Sebald (1944-2001).Both authors’ oeuvre is permeated by an intensive preoccupation with problems of historical and postgenocidal narration. Instead of simply comparing their approaches to representing historicaltrauma, I will argue that analyzing the differences in how their narratives deal with the contemporary is crucial for a better understandingof their differing approaches to historical narration.
First, I will show that Peter Weiss's novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975-1981,"The Aesthetics of Resistance"), which recounts the history of antifascist resistance movement through World War IIon its most ostensive narrative level, is written in anarrative mode that seeks to create a connection to the contemporary moment by mobilizing its readers' activity ofgenerating new historical linkages. While Weiss's pre-1989 novel may now seem to belong to a different era, its narrative mode and its vast transnational historical material make it into a text that offers new opportunities for rendering contemporary historical experience intelligible. For instance, Weiss's attention to linking different specific histories of oppression, through a literary text concerned with oppositional and anachronistic reading, is interesting for twenty-first-century comparatists, who seek increasingly refined critical tools for relating alternative modernities and projects of postcolonial emancipation.
W. G. Sebald, who presents Weiss as an exemplary postgenocidal author, reads Weiss in a mode that ignores Weiss's complex concern with a heterogeneous present and overemphasizes the dimension of trauma in Weiss's oeuvre. The comparison to Weiss makes apparent that while W. G. Sebald's own narrativessuppress the contemporary in their descriptions of the present as an empty space, Sebald’s untimely, analogical narrative mode also counteractsthe implied melancholic mode of reading history. Sebald's increasingly heterogeneous postimperial reading context amplifies the potential of Sebald's texts to prompt ungeneralizable responses that rethink how to narrate entangled histories of imperialism. My analyses of Weiss and Sebald articulate how the reading contexts of the twenty-first century demand new analytical questions on specific effects that come about when literary writing meets a heterogeneous readership.
Bio-Bibliography:
Ph.D. degree: Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University,August 2013
Dissertation: "Minding the Gap: Reading History with Joseph Conrad, Peter Weiss, and W. G. Sebald"
Dissertation advisors: Leslie A. Adelson, Dominick LaCapra. Natalie Melas,
As of September 2013: Postdoctoral fellow at the research project "Experience of History and the Ethics of Storytelling in Contemporary Arts", Department of Comparative Literature, University of Turku, Finland.
Recent Publications:
"A Readjustment in Our Bearings. Untimely Reference in Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance." In: Pirjo Lyytikäinen et al (eds.):Rethinking Mimesis.Concepts and Practices of Literary Representation. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,2012.
Markus Huss, Kaisa Kaakinen, Jenny Willner (eds.): "Dislocating Literature: Transnational Literature and the Directions of Literary Studies in the Baltic Sea Region."Theme section inBaltic Worlds. Vol. 5:2, 2012.