Date of Award

2019-01-01

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

English and American Literature

Advisor(s)

Marion C. Rohrleitner

Abstract

Examining, comparatively, the exemplary fictional texts of W. G. Sebald, Ana Menéndez, and Teju Cole enriches the study of exilic experience concerning cultural memory as their destabilization, while geographically and ethnically divergent, represents the constellations of mobility and potential for memory. As absences resonate and profoundly disrupt their works, there is a turn to histories to cope with traumas. By turning to the past, each writer confronts destabilization and uprootedness and, in doing so, plays a game with History. Readers play too as we search through the fictionalized lacunae to consider the extent to which we are complicit in the histories of violence, separation, and mourning. Throughout Sebald’s, Menéndez’s, and Cole’s respective oeuvres, three works, Austerlitz, Loving Ché, and Open City, trace time, space, mobility, and silence in a parallel fashion as they convey spectral geographies, bemoan the loss of the past, investigate embodied cartographies, and attempt to re-historicize a literary archive. Exploring the tensions between ways of knowing presented in visual, verbal, and tactile spaces of the city as depicted in these prose narratives, I will argue that the writers construct an alternative epistemology that reclaims subjectivity and problematizes “History” while engaged with a past that radiates in photographs and bodies.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

62 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Benjamin Lee Williams

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