Becoming ethically preoccupied through Currere: W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka and narrative self-representation

Abstract

Within education, we can learn a great deal from others’ uses of narrative as a site of praxis from which to work through difficult psychic processes. The narratives published by W.G. Sebald and Franz Kafka—as well as what we know about these authors’ narrative processes—hold important insights for the kind of narrative writing that can happen in currere. Born in Germany near the end of WWII and inheriting the heavy burden of the Holocaust, Sebald was concerned with the social implications of writing as a form of witness, even as he was persuaded that a narrative approach was more powerful than discursive prose. Sebald saw in the writing of narrative an attempt at restitution. For Franz Kafka, the writing of literary texts offered the only space in which he experienced some redemption from (as he called it) “murderers’ row.” Despite their stature, both considered themselves as periphereal writers; writing came from a felt sense of precarity and vulnerability. Both relied on unreliable narrators. By exploring the relations between Sebald’s and Kafka’s writing lives and their melancholy, I inquire into how both were driven by a sense of urgency in writing narratively (one form of which is literature) and look at how such writing embodied an ethical probing of unsettling preoccupations, in ways of compelling interest to projects of subjective/social reconstruction.