@inbook{988b987dbbb04acfbff7bb5ad92c47c5,
title = "Traumatic Europe: the impossibility of mourning in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz",
abstract = "Synthesising the work of Jacques Derrida with that of Dominick LaCapra, Dan Diner and others, this essay explores how W. G. Sebald{\textquoteright}s Austerlitz conjures up a post-war Europe constituted of continuous conflict and dispossession, and argues that mourning becomes the lingua franca of the post-war European novel. Further, Koulouris shows how Sebald{\textquoteright}s seminal text provides a rich constellation of insights into the ways we conceptualise Europe as a site of common aspirations and conflicting national and financial interests; in Austerlitz, Koulouris argues, Sebald establishes that if there is such a thing as a common European heritage then it is one consummated not only in actual trauma, of which we can barely think let alone textually represent, but also in the trauma of {\textquoteleft}impossible mourning{\textquoteright}.",
author = "Theodore Koulouris",
year = "2016",
month = sep,
day = "24",
language = "English",
isbn = "9781137526267",
series = "Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature",
publisher = "Palgrave Macmillan",
pages = "53--70",
editor = "A. Hammond",
booktitle = "The Novel and Europe: imagining the continent in post-1945 fiction",
}