Perpetrators Legacies

The book presents Winfried Georg Sebald and Ian McEwan as paradigmatic post-imperial writers who, enmeshed in the hierarchies of power inherited from their imperial times, strive to disentangle themselves from that burdensome legacy. They undertake a subtle detachment from the analogously implicated subject positions of their protagonists

Autorentext

Vladimir Biti is Chair Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. He is the author of eleven books, with Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma, 2016 (second, paperback edition 2017), Attached to Dispossession: Sacrificial Narratives in Post-imperial Europe, 2018, and Post-imperial Literature: Translatio Imperii in Kafka and Coetzee, 2022 (paperback edition forthcoming) among the most recent. He is the editor of the volumes Reexamining the National-Philological Legacy: Quest for a New Paradigm, 2014, Claiming the Dispossession: The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe, 2017, and co-editor of The Idea of Europe: The Clash of Projections, 2021. He is co-editor of Arcadia: Journal of Literary Culture and Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. From 2016 to 2022, he has been the Chair of the Academy of Europe's Literary and Theatrical Section.

Inhalt

Introduction

Co-implicated literatures: Towards a revised understanding of world literature

Section One

Entangled legacies

1. The long shadow of perpetrators: An undesired implication

2. Purification and enclosure: Post-imperial condition in Germany and Great Britain

Section Two

W. G. Sebald: Purifying the implicated self

3. Purifying the implicated self: Sebald, Wittgenstein, Montaigne, and 'care of the self'

4. Getting out of history: Levitation and paralysis in Sebald and Nabokov

5. Postmemory in action: (Re)creating the nodes of memory in The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz

Section Three

Ian McEwan: Longing for enclosure

6. Yearning for the plot: Enclosure in Black Dogs

7. Deprived of protection: The complicitous authorship in Atonement

8. Mutual reassertion: Community drive and individual exemption in The Children Act

References

Index