Re-Walking History through Daily Detour and Detritus in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn
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This essay considers W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn in terms of his engagement with the everyday as an unofficial archive of political violence that defies conventional mode of history writing. Following the wandering protagonist, who extracts from the surfaces of local objects the buried narratives of historical marginalization under capitalist, colonial modernity, this paper suggests that his embodied physical and verbal rambling and endlessly diverse daydreaming offer a powerful critique of the highly selective narrative of European civilization including British imperialism and Nazi ideology. If Western modernity has always defined itself against the uncomfortable burden of the past, Sebald dramatizes the gaps in official history by revealing what the inexorable forward motion of modern temporality has left behind. His effort to rearticulate hidden memories is distinctly expressed in the forms of slow and close reading of the everyday environment of English countryside, which simultaneously turns out to be a comprehensive reading that critically distances from Britain’s position in the global system of exploitation and oppression. This study argues that Sebald’s unique use of digressive and multi-layered literary forms along with visual montage indicates a constructive kind of totality that points to a revised concept of national time and space through capturing the simultaneously global and local dimension of intertwined histories.
Abstract
This essay considers W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn in terms of his engagement with the everyday as an unofficial archive of political violence that defies conventional mode of history writing. Following the wandering protagonist, who extracts from the surfaces of local objects the buried narratives of historical marginalization under capitalist, colonial modernity, this paper suggests that his embodied physical and verbal rambling and endlessly diverse daydreaming offer a powerful critique of the highly selective narrative of European civilization including British imperialism and Nazi ideology. If Western modernity has always defined itself against the uncomfortable burden of the past, Sebald dramatizes the gaps in official history by revealing what the inexorable forward motion of modern temporality has left behind. His effort to rearticulate hidden memories is distinctly expressed in the forms of slow and close reading of the everyday environment of English countryside, which simultaneously turns out to be a comprehensive reading that critically distances from Britain’s position in the global system of exploitation and oppression. This study argues that Sebald’s unique use of digressive and multi-layered literary forms along with visual montage indicates a constructive kind of totality that points to a revised concept of national time and space through capturing the simultaneously global and local dimension of intertwined histories.
참고문헌 (21)
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