This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies.
The article explores the weave of memory, time, and narrative as it unfolds in the autobiographical process. It offers a reading of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz as a book that outlines a new narrative vision of memory and autobiographical time. In this book Sebald, in a break with the traditional model of memory as an archive, describes remembering as an uncertain and speculative search movement which defies chronology, sequentiality, and linearity. What emerges instead is an idea of time as a mode of simultaneously co-existing moments and episodes from very different periods of clock and calendar time. This reading of Austerlitz leads, on a more general plane, to reflections about the autobiographical process as a way of narrative meaning-making that constitutes what Ricœur has called human time.
June 2008: Jens Brockmeier is a Senior Scientist at the Free University of Berlin, a Visiting Professor in the Psychology Department of the University of Manitoba at Winnipeg, and a Senior Research Fellow in the Center for Narrative Research of the University of East London. His research is concerned with the relationship between mind and language, focusing on narrative as a psychological, linguistic, and cultural form and its function for autobiographical memory, identity, and constructions of time. Among his books are The Literate Mind: Literacy and the Relation between Language and Culture (1998); Greenspeak: A Study of Environmental Discourse (1999, with R. Harré and P. Mühlhäusler); and the edited volumes Literacy, Narrative and Culture (2002); Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture (2001); and Narrative Realities: Perspectives on the Self (1997).
