Memory, Word and Image in Sebald and Joyce: Towards a Transhistorical Ethics Communicated Through Minor Interventions in the Form of the Printed Book

The writers James Joyce and W.G. Sebald adhered to, but also manipulated in similar and often hardly perceptible ways, the typographical conventions within the institution of literature. Writing on either side of the Second World War, they sought to sensitize readers to both the connectedness and the fragility of human lives. Both authors, by humbly placing their characters’ lives (micro-histories) at the outer edges of the maelstrom of catastrophic failures of regimes, ultimately make their readers hope against hope that remembering, connecting, and conceptualizing history through their word and image strategies can somehow modify the otherwise inevitable repetitions in and of history.