Novel Crime, Hunting and Investigation of the trace in Sebald’s Prose (original) (raw)

Narrative Discourse, Memory and the Experience of Travel in W. G. Sebald's Vertigo

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2016

Sebald’s first prose work, entitled Vertigo (Schwindel. Gefühle., 1990) is perhaps the most intriguing in terms of the absence of clear-cut links between the four narrative segments: “Beyle; or Love is a Madness Most Discrete,” “All’estero,” “Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva” and “Il ritorno in patria.” Beyle, i.e. Stendhal, Dr. K, i.e. Kafka, and the first-person narrator of the two quasi-autobiographical parts, are three subjects living in distinct times and places, whose journeys and experiences coalesce into a Sebaldian puzzle to solve, challenging the most varied interpretive terms and discourses, from the Freudian uncanny, through intertextuality (Kristeva) and the indexicality of photography (Barthes, Sontag), to the working of cultural memory (Assmann) and the non-places of what Marc Augé calls hypermodernity. By trying to disclose the discursive strategies of a profoundly elusive and highly complex narrative, the article is aimed at pointing out the rhetorical and textual connections lying at the heart of Sebald’s floating way of writing, heralding a vertiginous oeuvre, an unsettling literary journey

Narrative Discourse, Memory and the Experience of Travel in W. G. Sebald’sVertigo

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Philologica, 2016

Sebald's first prose work, entitled Vertigo (Schwindel. Gefühle ., 1990) is perhaps the most intriguing in terms of the absence of clear-cut links between the four narrative segments: "Beyle; or Love is a Madness Most Discrete," "All'estero," "Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva" and "Il ritorno in patria." Beyle, i.e. Stendhal, Dr. K, i.e. Kafka, and the first-person narrator of the two quasi-autobiographical parts, are three subjects living in distinct times and places, whose journeys and experiences coalesce into a Sebaldian puzzle to solve, challenging the most varied interpretive terms and discourses, from the Freudian uncanny, through intertextuality (Kristeva) and the indexicality of photography (Barthes, Sontag), to the working of cultural memory (Assmann) and the non-places of what Marc Augé calls hypermodernity. By trying to disclose the discursive strategies of a profoundly elusive and highly complex narrative, the article is aimed at pointing out the rhetorical and textual connections lying at the heart of Sebald's floating way of writing, heralding a vertiginous oeuvre, an unsettling literary journey. 1

Between Allegory and Modern Montage: The Images in W.G. Sebald’s “Vertigo”

CoSMo | Comparative Studies in Modernism, 2019

The paper focuses on the images in W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo , based on an iconographic interest. Absence in those images doesn’t come as abstraction, but by way of ostensive figuration. The deceased appear both allegorically and in person in their landscapes of death. The story of Vertigo follows Stendahl, Kafka and the narrator himself on their journeys through upper Italy. In Limone, the narrator tells his landlady that he is writing, as it appears to him more and more, a detective story. By coincidence, and against his will, he becomes involved: in Verona he meets a person named Carlo Cadavero, and on three occasions sees a scene with two men carrying a corpse on a stretcher, before the reader learns that it is Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus on his aimless and endless voyage through the deeper regions of death. After this disclosure the reader meets the restless hunter twice again in Wertach of all scenes, a tiny village in the Allgau and—as part of the book's third chapter – the narra...

Mapping the Evolution of Crime Fiction as a Genre: Eighteenth Century to the Contemporary Times

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2020

A mystery story which focuses on a crime and the investigation of that crime is commonly understood as a crime fiction narrative. Its ability to excite the readers, challenge their rational abilities and involve them in the gradual unravelling of the mystery is what makes crime fiction a huge success. With innumerable critical works, scholarly study and continued relevance, crime fiction has entered the canon of literature. A genre that closely reflects the socio-political, historical and cultural aspects of the society, it has gradually acquired a significant role both in critiquing the social order and at the same time for documenting history through its gradual evolution and development. This paper attempts to map the evolution of crime fiction from the eighteenth century to the contemporary times. In doing so, the paper aims to study how social changes impact literary traditions. This study also aims to establish the relevance of crime fiction as a literary genre as it evolves i...

Crime Writing: Language and Stylistics

2018

Gregoriou proposes a stylistic approach to the teaching of crime fiction. She starts with an exploration of the plot and discourse distinction through which students could begin to explore crime fictional story structure, before then delving into Emmott’s frame theory which can shed light on the ways in which crime texts (mis)direct readers. She then turns to consider the importance of narrative style and viewpoint choice in relation to characterisation and reader sympathy. Ryan’s possible world theory is subsequently introduced, the ways in which it can also shed light on crime narrative structure discussed. In doing so, she discusses the typical crime fiction effect of suspense, before lastly focusing on linguistic tools with which such suspense can also be generated.

The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction

2017

by Esterino Adami From booming Netflix series to popular novels, crime narrative continues to represent an attractive arena, whose boundaries are often porous and tend to mix with other genres. But when we approach a crime story, how does the text precisely manage to balance its parts so as to draw and maintain our attention until its final coup de theatre when the murderer is revealed? What are the linguistic and stylistic strategies that permit us to access the killer's mode of thought? Is it possible to delineate some specific traits of the genre and its ability to construct and develop suspense? These are some of the research questions that Reshmi Dutta-Flanders aims to address in her original, complex and informed monograph, in which she meticulously applies various tools and frameworks to a wealth of crime stories, with the purpose to illuminate the essence and structure of suspense. This may be defined as "an emotional process unlike mystery (the gradual revelation of criminous information), which is an intellectual process, as in a whodunit" (2, emphasis in original). The main focus of the volume is on three literary works: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926), Cover her Face by D. James (1962) and The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915), although other materials too are subjected to analysis. The structural intricacy of these three texts is the result of different techniques and is achieved especially thanks to the presence of a "hybrid voice, which is defined by

'Detective Fiction and "The Original Crime": Baudrillard, Calle, Poe'

Baudrillard appeared uninterested in the detective story and his work barely features in studies of the genre. This essay argues, however, that analyzing detective fiction from a Baudrillardian perspective – concentrating in particular on how the genre is structured around a tension between the forms Baudrillard termed " production " and " seduction " – can nonetheless illuminate how it works and enable us to reassess how far classic nineteenth-century detective fiction adhered to the principles of scientific logic, panopticism, and positivism. The essay begins by exploring detective fiction generally in relation to Baudrillardian approaches to the object and seduction before looking at two very different examples

The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives from Goethe to Kafka

Cornell University Press (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought), 2020

In The Case of Literature, Arne Höcker offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. His reinterpretations of Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Döblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and he argues that modern literature not only contributed to the development of the human sciences but also established itself as the privileged medium for a modern style of case-based reasoning. The Case of Literature deftly traces the role of narrative fiction in relation to the scientific knowledge of the individual from eighteenth-century psychology and pedagogy to nineteenth-century sexology and criminology to twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Höcker demonstrates how modern authors consciously engaged casuistic forms of writing to arrive at new understandings of literary discourse that correspond to major historical transformations in the function of fiction. He argues for the centrality of literature to changes in the conceptions of psychological knowledge production around 1800; legal responsibility and institutionalized forms of decision-making throughout the nineteenth century; and literature's own realist demands in the early twentieth century. "A brilliant book on the important genre of the literary case study. Arne Höcker shows how administrative decision-making, at the very moment in the 19th century when it seems to function flawlessly, gives birth to its uncanny other, the individual case study." (Fritz Breithaupt, Indiana University, author of The Dark Sides of Empathy) "The Case of Literature lucidly unfolds a history of the literary case study in German literature from Goethe to the modernists Döblin and Musil, with a concluding postscript on Kafka. This well written book uses original analyses of important texts to persuasively make the case for a three-phase contribution of German narrative to our understanding of the literary case study as a genre." (Judith Ryan, Harvard University, author of The Cambridge Introduction to German Poetry)