Sleepwalking certainties: agency, aesthetics, and incapacity in W.G. Sebald’s 'Austerlitz' and Hermann Broch’s 'The Sleepwalkers'

When we first encounter the narrator of Austerlitz, he is wandering around the unfamiliar town of Antwerp with, he tells us, “unsicheren Schritten” (1; 9). As well as reflecting the unfamiliarity of the locale, these “uncertain steps” evince a proud modesty characteristic of the classic Sebaldian narrator, a wanderer who discreetly relays the stories of the people and places he is privileged to encounter. Although Sebald does not use the phrase, steps of this sort, unpurposed yet unerring, are made with what is commonly known in German as somnambule Sicherheit: the legendary surefootedness of the sleepwalker. The convergence of sleepwalking and certainty in a single phrase poses an interesting challenge to one of the central tenets of the English-language canonization of Sebald, for his writing has been most highly valued for its ability to move the reader through apparent certainties towards a salutary uncertainty. But somnambule Sicherheit also presents the possibility that the current may be reversed, that narrative may move under cover of uncertainty towards certainty. That Sebald criticism has not been more troubled by this possibility is in no small part due to the fact that it tends to deploy the notion of sleepwalking with a minimum of reflection on its theoretical ramifications. To evoke some of the complexities of this matter, I first offer a brief cultural history of sleepwalking, as well as a brief account of the topic of uncertainty in Sebald criticism. Most of my argument, however, involves an extended comparative analysis of sleepwalking in Sebald's Austerlitz and Hermann Broch's 1933 trilogy The Sleepwalkers. Although these writers have not previously been the object of any sustained comparison, sleepwalking in Broch's novels illuminates much that is left implicit on the topic in Sebald's fiction and points toward some difficult questions regarding the role of aesthetics and agency in Sebald's work.

Winckelmann and the invention of antiquity: history and aesthetics in the age of Altertumswissenschaft

This volume provides a new perspective on the emergence of the modern study of antiquity, Altertumswissenschaft, in eighteenth-century Germany through an exploration of debates that arose over the work of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann between his death in 1768 and the end of the century. This period has long been recognised as particularly formative for the development of modern classical studies, and over the past few decades has received increased attention from historians of scholarship and of ideas. Winckelmann's eloquent articulation of the cultural and aesthetic value of studying the ancient Greeks, his adumbration of a new method for studying ancient artworks, and his provision of a model of cultural-historical development in terms of a succession of period styles, influenced both the public and intra-disciplinary self-image of classics long into the twentieth century. Yet this area of Winckelmann's Nachleben has received relatively little attention compared with the proliferation of studies concerning his importance for late eighteenth-century German art and literature, for historians of sexuality, and his traditional status as a 'founder figure' within the academic disciplines of classical archaeology and the history of art. Harloe restores the figure of Winckelmann to classicists' understanding of the history of their own discipline and uses debates between important figures, such as Christian Gottlob Heyne, Friedrich August Wolf, and Johann Gottfried Herder, to cast fresh light upon the emergence of the modern paradigm of classics as Altertumswissenschaft: the multi-disciplinary, comprehensive, and historicizing study of the ancient world.

Postmodernism, culture and feminism: the aesthetics of space and performance in Rock Follies and Rock Follies of '77

This article discusses the aesthetic and spatial representational strategies of the popular studio-based musical television drama serials Rock Follies and Rock Follies of ’77. It analyses how the texts’ themes relating to women and the entertainment industry are mediated through their postmodern ironic mode and representation of fantastic spaces. Rock Follies’ distinctive stylised aesthetic and mode of caricature are analysed with reference to the visual intentions and ‘voice’ of the writer, Howard Schuman. Through considering the programmes’ various spatial strategies, the article draws attention to the importance of visual and performance style in their postmodern discourse on culture, fantasy, gender and subjectivity. Analysis of the spaces of musical performance, characters’ domestic environments and simulated entertainment spaces reveals how a dialectic is established between the escapist imaginative pleasures of fantasy and the manipulative and exploitative practices of the culture industry. The shift from the optimism of the first series, when the LittleLadies first form, to the darker mood of the second series, in which they are increasingly divided by industry pressures, is traced through changes in the aesthetics of space and characterisation. As a space of artifice, performance and electronic visual manipulation that facilitates the texts’ reflexive representation of culture and feminised fantasy, the studio’s unique aesthetic strengths emerge through this case study.