The Latency of the Natural History: Language and Testimony in the W. G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur

Csongor Lőrincz

IN: Partitúra Irodalomtudományi folyóirat, Volume: IX. , Issue 1, 2014, p. 59-88, ISSN 1336-7307

DOI: 10.17846/PA.2014.9.1.59-88

Abstract

W.G. Sebald’s famous essay Luftkrieg und Literatur (Airwar and literature) focuses not only on the traces (and their obliteration) of the systematic airraids of the Allies against nazi germany in the collective memory. Sebald asks a number of fundamental questions concerning the witnessing of history in literature and literary reading. This focus leads him to expound the problems of historical and political anthropology in modernity. However, his essay discusses these circumstances not only in a discursive manner, but also by means of certain citational-textual configurations and their displacement.

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Partitúra is a Hungarian literary journal published in Slovakia twice a year. The first edition was issued in 2006. From 2007 to 2014 its publishers were the Faculty of Central European Studies at The Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra in cooperation with Sambucus Literary Society. Since 2014 the Faculty of Central European Studies at the CPU in Nitra became the sole publisher.

The journal releases peer-reviewed scientific articles, literary studies and art reviews of both Hungarian as well as world literature. It is also a forum for essays on several other arts and intercultural relations. Furthermore, special attention is devoted to the Central European literature and literary studies; the magazine not only publishes the reviews of such studies, but also provides the arena for reflections about them. The journal aims to give an account of the contemporary Hungarian literature of the Hungarian minorities as well as to serve as a cluster for discourses.

As for the structure of the paper, it is usually divided into three main sections. The first part generally deals with the translation of an important foreign abstract literary study. It is followed by the heading of Scientific Studies and the Columns of Critical Analysis. Partitúra regularly publishes thematic abstracts by authors, genres, as well as a literary and artistic phenomenon in focus.