LEADER 04888cam a2200397Ia 4500001 146804 005 20240621205323.0 008 090311s2008 xx rb 000 0 eng d 028 52 3320593 |bUMI 035 (OCoLC)ocn320842202 035 146804 049 LHMA 040 LHM |beng |erda |cLHM 090 PT2681.E18 |bZ35 2008 100 1 Chapman, J'Lyn. 245 10 Unmasking sanctioned authority : |ba study of word and image in the novels of W.G. Sebald / |cby J'Lyn Chapman. 264 1 [Place of publication not identified] : |b[publisher not identified], |c2008. 300 iv, 215 pages 336 text |btxt |2rdacontent 337 unmediated |bn |2rdamedia 338 volume |bnc |2rdacarrier 502 Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Denver, 2008. 504 Includes bibliographical references (pages 202-215). 520 This dissertation focuses on the confluence of text and image in the work of the German novelist and critic W.G. Sebald. The relationship between text and image produces a non-narrative structure that represents the weight of trauma and cultural dislocation, even as it ruptures narratives of history and progress, and mystifies "sanctioned authority," a term synonymous with totalitarianism. Sebald's project shows how history and subjectivities in the grip of sanctioned authority can be powerfully represented outside realistic narratives that document a linear passage of time and a "rational" understanding of the causes and effects of trauma. What is at stake for Sebald is the need to represent trauma-both personal and shared-as contingent and multiple in its effects, horrifying and specific but dispersed through time and space in its recreation in words and images that form multiple texts within a text. Nothing is made easier by this, and the physical trauma even becomes a metaphysical trauma. Yet there is somehow a therapeutic effect. In order to examine both the possibilities of representation and the subject itself, Sebald incorporates reproduced images (photographs, maps, blueprints, and newspaper clippings, for example) into his text and relies on the resulting intertextuality to mediate and open up meaning in ways that unpack the trauma. He creates narrators and characters who enact the challenge to represent unavoidable history through writing, memory, and images that construct their identities and memories in opposition to the ethical failures of the totalizing narratives of sanctioned authority.By discussing Sebald's novels in the order in which they were written, the dissertation presents close readings of the texts. The dissertation is also inter-discursive in that it intersperses commentary on the nature of interpreting Sebald's work within the context of parallel texts: post-Holocaust cultural critique. So there is reference to the ideas of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Hannah Arendt. These theorists intersect with Sebald in their critique of the Enlightenment project, the Holocaust and totalitarianism, as well as in their focus on individual life and its relationship to society and history. Further, the dissertation also uses a post-Freudian interpretation of trauma and repression to discuss the compulsive return of subjects (characters and narrators) and texts (Sebald's critical work and fiction) to moments of disjunction. And holding all this together is my view of Sebald's texts as rhizomatic in structure, willing and able to weave together multiple discourses, which itself plainly owes a debt to the critical theories of Deleuze and Guatarri.Sebald's work demonstrates that the way to bear witness to trauma and historical rupture is to represent the processes of interpreting a horror that is past but always present, and to enter into these processes from a perspective that must continually examine itself. Thus this dissertation seeks to reveal the reciprocal nature of Sebald's visual and written texts and the way they establish social and personal trauma as painfully real, even as they are always contingent and open to multiple readings. 530 Electronic version(s) |bavailable internally at USHMM. 533 Photocopy. |bAnn Arbor, Mich. : |cUMI Dissertation Services. |e22 cm. 590 Dissertations and Theses 591 Record updated by Marcive processing 21 June 2024 600 10 Sebald, W. G. |q(Winfried Georg), |d1944-2001 |xCriticism and interpretation. 650 0 Totalitarianism and literature. 650 0 Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature. 856 41 |uhttp://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1594487791&sid=58&Fmt=6&clientId=54617&RQT=309&VName=PQD |zElectronic version from ProQuest 956 41 |uhttp://dc.ushmm.org/library/bib146804/3320593.pdf |zHosted by USHMM. 852 0 |bstacks |hPT2681.E18 |iZ35 2008 852 |bwww 852 |bebook