The Impossible Post-apocalypse:Trauma and Style in Louis Ferdinand Céline's From One Castle to the Other and in Thomas Bernhard's The Origin

Authors

  • Francisco Salaris Banegas Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

Keywords:

trauma, style, post-apocalypse

Abstract

Published almost ten years apart, the novels D’un château l’autre, by Louis Ferdinand Céline, and Die Ursache, by Thomas Bernhard, narrate events that occurred at the same historical moment: the end of World War II. The traumatic experience of the bombings engenders in the narrators a horrified and fascinated vision at the same time, and the destruction thus begins to be perceived as an aesthetic fact. This paper intends to study how trauma appears as a decisive factor in the configuration of Céline and Bernhard's style, based on the aforementioned works. For this, elements such as the relationship between reality and language, the rhythm and structure of prose, misanthropy, the place of writing, temporal conceptions, etc. will be analyzed. The presence of trauma hinders any possibility of post-apocalyptic space, because the present and the future disarticulate before the great weight of the past.

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Author Biography

  • Francisco Salaris Banegas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

    Licenciado en Letras Modernas (UNC) y estudiante avanzado de la Licenciatura en Lengua y Literatura Alemanas (UNC). Doctorando en Letras con beca doctoral financiada por SeCyT (título: “La representación del trauma en la literatura alemana contemporánea y su recepción en tres escritores argentinos”). Profesor Adscripto en las cátedras de Literatura alemana y Literatura Europea Comparadas (FFyH, UNC).

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Published

2020-12-31

How to Cite

The Impossible Post-apocalypse:Trauma and Style in Louis Ferdinand Céline’s From One Castle to the Other and in Thomas Bernhard’s The Origin. (2020). Revista De Culturas Y Literaturas Comparadas, 10, 70-83. https://revistas.psi.unc.edu.ar/index.php/CultyLit/article/view/31863