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 when read 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 notions by comparing the literary work of two Germanlanguage 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 historical trauma, I will argue that analyzing the
differences in how their narratives deal with the contemporary is crucial for a
better understanding of their differing approaches to historical narration.
First, I will show that Peter Weiss's novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (19751981, "The Aesthetics of Resistance"), which recounts the history of antifascist
resistance movement through World War II on its most ostensive narrative level,
is written in a narrative mode that seeks to create a connection to the
contemporary moment by mobilizing its readers' activity of generating 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 narratives
suppress the contemporary in their descriptions of the present as an empty
space, Sebald’s untimely, analogical narrative mode also counteracts the 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 in Baltic Worlds. Vol. 5:2, 2012.