Some Remarks upon the Memorial Writing of W.G. Sebald

Abstract

In two well-known passages from Paul Ricœur’s work (Ricœur 1990b, 187; 2006, 260), the author proposes approaching memorial writing of the Holocaust not necessarily in the same terms as historiography. On the basis of these passages, the aim of this article is to further explore Ricœur’s intuition by suggesting a comparison with the prose of a contemporary author who intentionally seeks to create a hybrid between history and fiction: W. G. Sebald. Although Sebald never considered himself a novelist, his writing explicitly addresses the challenge of representing trauma, particularly in relation to the Holocaust. This article applies Ricœur’s insights on the function of the productive imagination and the effect on the reader to Sebald’s fragmentary style of writing. My thesis, derived from this application, insists on viewing memory in the face of horror and trauma not as something merely representational, but as a dynamic process we actively engage in, highlighting Ricœur’s emphasis on the role of reader in shaping our understanding of the past.

Keywords

• P. Ricoeur
• W.G. Sebald
• memory
• aesthetics of reception
• hermeneutics