Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Cultural Memory Through Spaces: An Analysis Of A. Mitgutsch’S House Of Childhood And J. Erpenbeck’S Visitation, Rachel Lynch
Cultural Memory Through Spaces: An Analysis Of A. Mitgutsch’S House Of Childhood And J. Erpenbeck’S Visitation, Rachel Lynch
Selected Undergraduate Works
Anna Mitgutsch’s House of Childhood (2000) and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation (2008) use places as holders of cultural memory and historical witnesses. House of Childhood follows Max Berman as he returns to his childhood village to reclaim his Jewish family’s house. Visitation offers snapshots of German life in the same house in different time periods. Cultural memory, in Jan Assmann’s theory, is memory rooted in objectivized culture. When culture is crystallized into texts, images, buildings, landscapes, etc., these objects hold the history of a group and inform the group’s unity and self-image. Assmann outlines six characteristics of cultural memory: concretion of …
Confessional Melancholy: W.G. Sebald’S Aesthetic Solution To The Inadequacy Of Representation, Theo Koskoff
Confessional Melancholy: W.G. Sebald’S Aesthetic Solution To The Inadequacy Of Representation, Theo Koskoff
Selected Undergraduate Works
In the wake of W.G. Sebald’s death in 2001, scholarship on his unique, genre-bending literary texts has flourished. Though much of this scholarship has paid due attention to the theme of the inadequacy of representation, little has been written that focuses on Sebald’s persistent expressions of melancholy in relation to this theme. In this paper, I argue that Sebald’s response to the inadequacy of representation is “confessional melancholy”: he expresses anguish at that which has been lost by admitting that his own literary representation is inadequate in portraying its subjects. Using a theoretical framework borrowed from Theodor Adorno and the …