Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary: Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald

by Kaisa Kaakinen

Overview

This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century — Conrad, Weiss and Sebald — it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory, trauma theory and transnational and postcolonial studies, the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature to address not only implied but also various unimplied reading positions that engage history in displaced yet material ways. This book opens new analytical paths for thinking about literary texts as media of historical imagination and conceiving relations between incommensurable historical events and contexts. Challenging overly global and overly local readings alike, the book presents a sophisticated contribution to discussions on how to reform the discipline of comparative literature in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319847498
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/01/2018
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017
Pages:	261
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kaisa Kaakinen works as postdoctoral researcher in comparative literature at University of Turku, Finland. She completed her doctoral degree in comparative literature at Cornell University, USA, in 2013 and conducted dissertation research at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Her publications deal with twentieth and twenty-first-century literature and the intersections of literature and history, and she has taught comparative literature at Cornell University, University of Helsinki and University of Turku.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Comparative Readings in the Twenty-First Century.- PART I: OUTLINING THE FUTURE: PETER WEISS'S DIE ÄSTHETIK DES WIDERSTANDS AND THE PARATAXIS OF HISTORY.- 2. Sensory Representations and Untimely Reference in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands.- 3. Coordinates of Comparison: Weiss’s Poetics of Historical Relation.- PART II: "I WOULD NOT EVEN INVENT A TRANSITION." (RE-) CONTEXTUALIZING JOSEPH CONRAD.- 4. Imperial Comparison and Postcolonial Reading.- 5. Conrad as a Bridge.- PART III: ANALOGY AND THE NARRATION OF TRAUMA IN W. G. SEBALD'S AUSTERLITZ AND DIE RINGE DES SATURN.- 6. Repetition and Digression: Sebald's Narratives of Trauma.- 7. Configurations of the Present in Sebald.- 8. Conclusion: Present Futures.- Bibliography.-

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Kaisa Kaakinen’s book is a major contribution to the contemporary debates on comparability and incommensurability of world literature. In making a strong case for weak analogies, it develops a model for studying active audiences and heterogeneous historically situated reading positions in contemporary transnational modes of historical narration. Over and above the skillful, complex and imaginative analyses of various textual strategies for making historical comparisons in Conrad, Weiss and Sebald, the book powerfully performs its own weak analogies by bringing together authors as diverse as these in a new and compelling way.” (Eneken Laanes, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Tallinn University, Estonia)

“Kaisa Kaakinen’s study forcefully contributes to the critical task of reconceptualizing practices of comparison for our age of increasing global connection along with inequality and violence. The well-chosen author trio of Weiss, Conrad, and Sebald allows Kaakinen to intertwine postcolonial paradigms with the field of transnational European literature, and to deploy twentieth-century texts towards a theory of reading for our world today. What happens, Kaakinen asks brilliantly, when a modernist poetics of gaps and ‘weak analogies’ meets heterogeneous―implied, unimplied, and unwelcome―audiences? In the interplay of connection across contexts with historical anchoring, these exciting readings demonstrate, the encounter unleashes a multidirectional imagination probing past and future relatedness.” (Claudia Breger, Professor of Germanic Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, USA)

“This is a major intervention into comparative methodologies, theories of transnational relations, and discussions about the future legibility of historical narration in literary texts. Kaakinen’s theory of weak analogies, as well as her development of the significance of the “overhearing” reader (the one who overhears conversations not directly addressed to the reader), will undoubtedly influence comparative literature scholars to come.” (David Kelman, Associate Professor, California State University, Fullerton, USA)

Editorial Reviews

Kaakinen’s rich study is lucidly and elegantly written throughout. The study is exemplary in its sustained correlation between formal analysis and historical signification.” (Jobst Welge, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 57 (3), 2020)

From the Publisher