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MISSED ENCOUNTERS. STENDHAL, SEBALD AND THE RETURN OF WATERLOO.pdf (294.59 kB)

Missed Encounters: Stendhal, Sebald and the Return of Waterloo

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posted on 2017-08-21, 11:03 authored by Philip J. Shaw
This article focusses on the representation of the Battle of Waterloo in Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma (1839) and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995). In doing so the article also considers broader questions about wartime experience and the persistence of traumatic memory in Stendhal’s autobiographical writings, while reflecting on Sebald’s sustained engagement with the unsettling effects of war in Stendhal’s life and work in Vertigo (1990) and Austerlitz (2001). Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s account of trauma as a “history that can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence”, the article claims that what Stendhal and Sebald share in their unorthodox accounts of Waterloo and the Napoleonic wars is an interest in the potential of traumatic memory to disrupt narrative time and thus, via Lacan, to open up history to the return of the Real. Key to this reading is a focus on the disparity between official, commemorative accounts of Waterloo, and the interest displayed by Stendhal and Sebald alike in the ghastly, inert residue that remains when such accounts fail to capture the Real of war.

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Citation

Interférences littéraires, 2017, 20, pp. 11-26.

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, ARTS AND HUMANITIES/School of English

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  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

Interférences littéraires

Publisher

Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve) and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,

Acceptance date

2015-12-04

Copyright date

2017

Available date

2017-10-07

Publisher version

http://drupal.arts.kuleuven.be/interferences/nl/node/685

Language

en

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