Description
Book SynopsisPseudo-Memoir explores the return in the twentieth century of a genre that had largely gone out of fashion after the novel came of age in Europe in the eighteenth century.
Trade Review"
Pseudo-Memoirs is a great scholarly achievement that has lain the groundwork for new directions in research on (auto-)biographical fiction."—Benjamin Schaper,
Germanic Review"The literary eccentrics studied here have been gathered together before . . . but Tobias's highly original and creative philosophical argument makes it a gathering worth attending."—Paul Buchholz,
Monatshefte“With its bold reevaluation of the relationship between fictional and nonfictional discourses,
Pseudo-Memoirs offers an important new perspective on the concept of realism and invites us to rethink our understanding of the ideological force of authorial paradigms.”—Jan Mieszkowski, author of
Crises of the Sentence“Remarkable. . . . Refreshingly immune to the passing fads of our critical situation, Rochelle Tobias’s sober and caring study makes valuable and lasting contributions to the intersection of literature and philosophy, German studies, comparative modernism, literary theory, narratology, and the study of aesthetic autobiography.”—Gerhard Richter, University Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University
Table of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Phenomenology and the Truth of Fiction
1. The Character: Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull
2. The Narrator: Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten
3. The Work: Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction
4. The Author: W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo
Conclusion: On the Value of Dissembling
Notes
Bibliography
Index
