2 results
2 - Who Is the Narrator? Anna Seghers's “The Excursion of the Dead Girls”: Narrative Mode and Cinematic Depiction
- from Part I - Anna Seghers: A Missing Piece in the Canon of Modernist Storytellers
- Edited by Kristy R. Boney, Jennifer Marston William
-
- Book:
- Dimensions of Storytelling in German Literature and Beyond
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 April 2019
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2018, pp 24-42
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THE TITLE OF Anna Seghers's novella “The Excursion of the Dead Girls” sounds uncanny, as adventure and diversion are contrasted with the theme of death. This “masterpiece” is considered the author's only autobiographical work, one closely linked in theme and chronology to her life story. Because in this requiem for her female schoolmates, as well as her own parents, Seghers “reveals facts of her life, her youth, and the time of exile, nevertheless in the form of a narrative creation.” Doing “memory work” the author envisions things past, her youth and homeland (Heimat), while also mourning the lost promise of an idyll that was crushed by the events of history.
Who is the narrator and how is the story told? In this first-person narration there is generally a distinction between the narrating self and the experiencing self, contrasting the remembering I with the remembered I, Seghers at the time of her exile with the figure of Netty in her childhood. The treatment of the authentic and the autobiographical in Seghers not only recollects the excursion as an episode in her childhood, but also addresses different levels of time and facts of history up to the time of narration in the year 1943. This concerns actual events from Seghers's life story as well as from history, for instance references to Emperor Wilhelm II and the First World War; figures such as Hitler and Goebbels; the crossing of the Rhine by allied troops after the war, and later the re-occupation of the Rhineland by Hitler and the Wehrmacht. Additionally, the text refers to the Confessional Church (E 288) or “Bekennende Kirche,” which Seghers calls “Bekenntniskirche,” the Nazis’ doctrine of “racial defilement” and the concentration camps (E 290); and the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof: E 298). In addition, there are topographical references, such as to Petersau(e), an island in the Rhine, Amöneburg (E 300), and to Nonnenwerth, another island (E 301); and although her hometown, Mainz, is not mentioned by name, Seghers lists several streets such as Christhof Street (Christofstrasse), as well as the Christhof church, the late-Gothic church (St. Christoph), a ruin after it was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1942 (E 302).
10 - Kafka’s Visual Method: The Gaze, the Cinematic, and the Intermedial
- Edited by Stanley Corngold, Ruth Gross
-
- Book:
- Kafka for the Twenty-First Century
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 10 February 2023
- Print publication:
- 03 October 2011, pp 165-178
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
KAFKA IS REMARKABLE, above all, for the visual density of his writing, a visual prowess that can be linked to his self-image as an “eye-person” (Augenmensch). His extraordinary literary imagination generates an imagery that startles and challenges the reader who expects the recognizable. Kafka’s intent, it has been said, is “to make strange the familiar.” Like his much admired model, Gustave Flaubert, he radically changed the fictional worlds that European realism had mapped out. The transformative power of his writing, however, unlike Flaubert’s, arises from the stark, suggestive force of his images: the resulting dynamics of puzzlement and shock reveal the crafty use of the gaze, cinematic techniques, and intermedial linkages. Many of Kafka’s narratives rely on the gaze of the main characters; he employs cinematic means to structure the visual plane of his narratives; and he connects the elements of different media to produce an active exchange of medial domains.
Kafka found new means of representation. Metamorphosing the metaphor, he suspended its literalization. The familiar seems fantastic, while the unfamiliar takes on the appearance of the normal and realistic. Kafka’s visuality uses innovative strategies and transformative techniques to create a literary and intermedial imaginary that is both realist and fantastic. He clearly privileges the perception and representation of the visual. Kafka critics have noticed the filmic quality of his texts, commenting also on his love of contemporary cinema, although the extent to which Kafka “goes to the movies” in his writing is in some dispute. While some critics claim that Kafka’s writings are not informed by the cinema, others see a significant intermediality. Nonetheless, Kafka’s “visual method” uses the main character as a narrative vehicle and center of perception, employing the cinema as a model and structuring principle. This results in a form of cinematic representation that asks the reader to experience a viewer’s perception.
Kafka often begins his narratives by inhabiting the position of observer. This is true for his earliest extant narrative, “Description of a Struggle” (“Beschreibung eines Kampfes,” 1936), an unfinished work, parts of which were probably begun in 1902. Remarkable for its structural complexity and intricacy of theme and variations, this narrative strategically places the first-person narrator as passive observer at a Lenten party, making him the agent or focalizer of narrated perception.