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Scraping Down the Past: Memory and Amnesia in W. G. Sebald's Anti-Narrative
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 34, Number 2, October 2010
- pp. 394-408
- 10.1353/phl.2010.0006
- Article
- View Citation
- Additional Information
Vanguard anti-narrativist Galen Strawson declares personal memory unimportant for self-constitution. But what if lapses of personal memory are sustained by a morally reprehensible amnesia about historical events, as is described in the work of W.G. Sebald? The importance of memory cannot be downplayed in such cases. For Sebald's characters, recovery of historical and personal memory results in self-dissolution rather than self-understanding . In the end, Sebald shows how memory can be significant, even imperative, within a deeply anti-narrativist outlook on the self, memory, and history.
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