The crisis of cultural knowledge in Michael Koehlmeier's 'Telemach', Christoph Ransmayr's 'Morbus Kitahara' and W. G. Sebald's 'Die Ringe des Saturn'

This dissertation presents thorough textual interpretations of several novels by Austrian and German authors written in the mid-nineties with the aim of investigating the crisis of cultural knowledge, a phenomenon within recent German-language postmodern literature, in which authors combine dystopic themes, such as the return of myth, apocalypse and destruction, with narrative transgressions that serve to highlight the precarious status of the fictional work. The literary analyses seek to reveal how the three selected works critically examine the function of myth, history and material culture as vehicles of cultural knowledge through the metafictional undermining of the text, revealing a trend towards authorial reflection on the crisis of human and specifically cultural knowledge in the postmodern novel at the close of the twentieth century. Further, this study attempts to demonstrate how the novels, despite the numerous gestures of ends, limits and aporia, continue to pursue strategies of communicating meaning that reflect the changed possibilities within the discourse of postmodernity for the representation of cultural knowledge.