Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-245) and index.
Contents:
Modern identity : historical, relational - and narrative? -- Structural and historical tensions in the dynamic observer narrative -- On the right side of history : emerging dynamic observer narration in Friedrich Ludwig Textor and Theodor Storm -- War of the words : radical internarration in Wilhelm Raabe's Stuffcake -- Günter Grass's litanies of the past : performative language and Vergangenheitsbesältigung -- My mother, my self : language and (dis)identification in postwar mother books -- A footnote to history : German trauma and the ethics of Holocaust representation in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz.
Summary:
"In Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature, Katra A. Byram proposes a new category-the dynamic observer form-to describe a narrative situation that emerges when stories about others become an avenue to negotiate a narrator's own identity across past and present. Focusing on German-language fiction from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Byram demonstrates how the dynamic observer form highlights historical tensions and explores the nexus of history, identity, narrative, and ethics in the modern moment. Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator contributes to scholarship on both narrative theory and the historical and cultural context of German and Austrian literary studies. Narrative theory, according to Byram, should understand this form to register complex interactions between history and narrative form. Byram also juxtaposes new readings of works by Textor, Storm, and Raabe from the nineteenth century with analyses of twentieth-century works by Grass, Handke, and Sebald, ultimately reframing our understanding of literary Vergangenheitsbewa;ltigung, or the struggle to come to terms with the past. Overall, Byram shows that neither the problem of reckoning with the past nor the dynamic observer form is unique to Germany's post-WWII era. Both are products of the dynamics of modern identity, surfacing whenever critical change separates what was from what is. "-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.