Book Section
In an essay on Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald remarked observes that ‘the grotesque deformities of our inner lives have their background and origin in collective social history’. Weiss's works explore the relationships between writing and action, aesthetics and politics. This short essay discusses some fragments of texts by Weiss, asking how subjects formed and (grotesquely) deformed by history can continue to resist or intervene to alter its course.
Keywords: Peter Weiss; W. G. Sebald; Marxism; resistance
Title
Resistance I
Author(s)
Hannah Proctor
Identifier
Description
In an essay on Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald remarked observes that ‘the grotesque deformities of our inner lives have their background and origin in collective social history’. Weiss's works explore the relationships between writing and action, aesthetics and politics. This short essay discusses some fragments of texts by Weiss, asking how subjects formed and (grotesquely) deformed by history can continue to resist or intervene to alter its course.
Is Part Of
Re-
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
22 January 2019
Subject
Peter Weiss
W. G. Sebald
Marxism
resistance
Rights
© by the author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Language
en-GB
page start
113
page end
120
Source
Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 113–20

References

  • Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422
  • Jameson, Fredric, ‘Foreword: A Monument to Radical Instants’, in Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, pp. vii–xlix
  • Lindner, Burkhardt, and Christian Rogowski, ‘Between Pergamon and Plötzensee: Another Way of Depicting the Course of Events an Interview with Peter Weiss’, New German Critique, 30 (Autumn 1983), pp. 107–26
  • Mandel, Ernest, ‘Trotsky in Exile’ [programme notes from the 1971 London production] <https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1971/xx/exile.htm> [accessed 15 December 2018]
  • Scherpe, Klaus R., and James Gussen, ‘Reading the Aesthetics of Resistance: Ten Working Theses’, New German Critique, 30 (Autumn 1983), pp. 97–105
  • Sebald, W. G., ‘The Remorse of the Heart: On Memory and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss’, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. by Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 169–91
  • Weiss, Peter, Marat/Sade, trans. by Geoffrey Skelton and Adrian Mitchell (New York; Atheneum, 1983)
  • Weiss, Peter, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 1: A Novel, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
  • White, John J., ‘History and Cruelty in Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade”’, Modern Language Review, 63.2 (1968), pp. 437–48

Cite as: Hannah Proctor, ‘Resistance I’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 113-20 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-15_14>