From Kafka to Sebald

Sabine Wilke is Professor of German at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, where she is also associated with European Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her research and teaching interests include modern German literature and culture, intellectual history and theory, and cultural studies. She has written books and articles on body constructions in modern German literature and culture, German unification, the history of German film and theater, contemporary German authors and filmmakers, German colonialism and the overlapping concerns of postcolonialism and ecocriticism.

• Introduction; Sabine Wilke:; Kafka, Modernism, and Beyond; I: Kafka's Slippages; Stanley Corngold: ; Ritardando in Das Schlos; Imke Meyer:; Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" as Allegory of Bourgeois Subject Construction; II: Kafka Effects; Jens Rieckmann:; Hofmannsthal after 1918: The Present as Exile; Rolf Goebel:; Yvan Goll's Die Eurokokke: a Reading Through Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk; III: Narrative Theory; Gail Finney:; Else Meets Dora: Narratology as a Tool for Illuminating Literary Trauma; Heidi Schlipphacke:; "Das kleine Ich": Robert Menasse and Masculinity in Real Time; Judith R. Ryan:; Sebald's Encounters with French Narrative; IV: Autobiography; Lorna Martens:; Gender, Psychoanalysis, and Childhood Autobiography: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster; Walter H. Sokel:; Provisional Existence.

"This wide-ranging, sophisticated anthology provides impetus to the renewed interest in a scholarly narratological approach to prose fiction. By drawing an ark between Franz Kafka and W. G. Sebald—two of the most innovative experimenters within the genre—editor Sabine Wilke projects a whole spectrum of diverse narrative experiments. Ten expert scholars contribute findings which can readily be applied to modern narratives beyond any single national literature." -- Guy Stern, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of German and Slavic Studies, Wayne State University, USA