Stanford Humanities Center
Originally from Shanghai, China, Feiyang Kuang is a senior double majoring in English and German Studies. Outside of the Stanford campus, her most cherished memories come from the time she spent in Germany during the BOSP program, via the Krupp internship, and, most recently, when she was gathering materials for her thesis research. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time outdoors, writing fiction, figure-sketching, singing, dancing, hiking, and playing tennis with friends.
SHC Project
Between Fiction and Scholarship: Attempts at Restitution in W. G. Sebald’s "Austerlitz"
Advisors: Nancy Ruttenburg, Alex Woloch
What is the focus of your current research?
My research is an archival and theoretical engagement with the 2001 German novel Austerlitz by the author W. G. Sebald, who worked as a professor of European literature. Sebald’s academic affiliation, refracted through many of his narrators and characters, is constitutive of the distinctly archaic Sebaldian register. In my research, I hope to formulate a detailed account of this mode of scholarly narration, which I view as a key site of the encounter between the scholar’s theorical impulse and a phenomenological narratorial language.
What drew you to this topic?
When I first encountered Austerlitz, I was immediately struck by how familiar it was. It was as if the diction and nearly pathological hypersensitivity had been lifted from twentieth century German theory and wrapped in the distinctly lyrical, literary register of an English novel. Until then, my two majors had filled parallel niches, with a focus on literary studies in English and an emphasis on critical theory in German Studies. As one can imagine, with its polyglot scholarly narrators and composed by a German scholar who spent four decades teaching in the U.K., Austerlitz, in one sweep stroke, closes both of my linguistic and the disciplinary gaps, making way, in every way, for the research I wanted to conduct.
How are you conducting your research?
This past summer, I spent a month at the German Literature Archive (DLA) in Marbach, examining materials from Sebald’s personal estate, which include manuscripts and proofs of Austerlitz, photographs, letters and personal items (e.g., a butterfly). Currently, I’m organizing my notes from the archive towards a structural framework. Alongside this, I’m working through theoretical accounts of the archive and methodological references on genetic criticism.
What would people be surprised to learn about the topic you are working on?
That the manuscripts of this 2001 novel were done entirely in pen and pencil. Sebald nursed a raging invective against technicity: his university office remained untouched by a computer.
In your view, why is it valuable to study this topic?
The beautiful academic book is known to idle away on a tabletop until it gains a thin gossamer of dignified ornamental gloss. Between the threats inherent to the traditional theoretical language of academia, on the one hand, and the highly optimized, electric accessibility of contemporary bestsellers and popular cultural texts on the other, the ever-widening gap between them appears by far the most dangerous. To me, Sebald’s scholarly narrators offer us a potent model of thinking with and through such divides in their elemental form, one which negotiates the weight of historical trauma and theoretical traditions while engaging with conditions of postmodernity.
How is your honors thesis impacting you academically and/or personally?
It is wonderful to have a pocket of time devoted to sustained, self-paced thinking. Through my research process, I found the working idea of my thesis both instructed by and itself instructs my coursework, readings, and academic conversations as well as my own consideration as an aspiring scholar. In this sense, I like to glorify my thesis project as one that fits the proper Sartrean definition.
How do you anticipate the fellowship will be able to support your research?
It is a great blessing to have a room of one’s own, and as an aspiring researcher, it is perhaps an even greater blessing to share it with peer scholars. I once saw cited as the archetype of the scholar the seventeenth-century depiction of St. Augustine alone in his study holding a blazing heart, which the rays of “veritas”— truth—inflame from above. The scholar’s solitude and (a)sociability have been a fascinating topic that is immediately adjacent to my research. It is significant to me that St. Augustine is popularly depicted in his own library; on the other hand, a strictly solitary language would be an oxymoron, and humanities research is surely at its peak when there is not a solo but rather a chorus of human voices involved. Our room at the Humanities Center is precisely that; it is a bundle of solitude and solidarity.
