Historical Constellations and Literary Inheritance in Contemporary Autofiction
About Benjamin Cook’s Research:
This showcase functions as a visual constellation of texts and images exploring how contemporary autofiction assembles fragments of past and present, inspired by the hybrid, archival forms of W. G. Sebald and Kate Zambreno. It is based on the third chapter of my PhD thesis, which focuses on Zambreno’s two autofiction works, Drifts (2020) and To Write as if Already Dead (2021).
This project explores how contemporary autofiction engages with literary history and historical memory through fragmentary and archival forms. Focusing on the work of Kate Zambreno and her engagement with W. G. Sebald, the research examines how contemporary autofiction assembles fragments of past and present, drawing together archival materials, literary references, and personal experience into new configurations of meaning. In doing so, it highlights the genre’s capacity to situate individual contemporary experience within broader histories of both the cultural and personal.
The showcase will present this argument through a visual “constellation” display inspired by Walter Benjamin’s concept of historical constellations. This showcase consists of interconnected fragments of text and images influenced by Zambreno’s works, alongside references to Sebald and Benjamin. This format aims to make the research accessible and visually engaging, allowing viewers to navigate connections between texts, images, and ideas.
About Benjamin Cook:
Benjamin Cook is a doctoral researcher in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His research examines contemporary autofiction through the work of writers including Rachel Cusk, Claire-Louise Bennett and Kate Zambreno, exploring how these texts negotiate questions of subjectivity, mediation, and self-representation under contemporary capitalism.
Constellation
This showcase adopts the form of a constellation rather than a linear argument. Like the texts it examines, it brings together images, quotations, and ideas that can be approached from multiple directions.
Figure 1– The Constellations (December November October), W.G. Evan, 1956
In Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), ideas are described as ‘timeless constellations, and by virtue of the elements’ being seen as points in such constellations, phenomena are subdivided and at the same time redeemed; so that those elements which it is the function of the concept to elicit from phenomena are most clearly evident at the extremes.’
-Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John
Osbourne (London: Verso, 1998), pp.34-35
Meaning then emerges not from a single path through the material but from the connections formed between its distinct components. Through this subdivision, these elements are reframed, rather than subsumed into grand narratives
Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin’s ideas were deeply rooted in his unorthodox pairing of Jewish theology and mysticism, as exemplified in his correspondence with Gershom Scholem, and his studies in Marxism in connection with the Frankfurt School and Bertolt Brecht.
[…] history becomes part of the setting, it
does so as script. The word “history”
stands written on the countenance of
nature in the characters of transience. The
allegorical physiognomy of natural history
[…] is present in reality in the form of the
ruin.’
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), p.177
Walter Benjamin described history not as a continuous sequence of events but as a constellation in which different moments can suddenly illuminate one another. Historical understanding emerges when fragments from different periods are brought into relation. This idea provides the inspiration for the visual structure of this showcase.
Contemporary Autofiction
Figure 2– A Microscopic Photograph of Volcanic Dust From Mount Soufriere, St Vincent, Tempest Anderson, 1902
Autofiction is often associated with the writer’s depiction of their own lived experience and the representation of the contemporary self. This project explores a different possibility. Through the work of Kate Zambreno and her engagement with W. G. Sebald, contemporary autofiction is examined in its attempts to assemble fragments of literary history, archival materials, images, and memories into new configurations of meaning. Rather than simply attempting to document a continuous present, these texts place different historical moments into relation, creating constellations that connect the writer’s personal experience to broader histories of literature and culture.
Personal and Historical Memory
Figure 3– Untitled image, Hortus Malabaricus, 1678-1693.
Memory is never a simple recovery of what has been lost. It is a process of selection, arrangement, and interpretation. In order to remember something, we must be able to first forget it. To remember is to continually form a narrative that necessarily contains gaps. Contemporary autofiction frequently stages this process, revealing how the writer’s own personal memories intersect with literary histories and and inherited forms. The past appears not as something clear or complete but as something continually reconstructed.
Archive
Figure 4– Synoptic Table of Physiognomic Traits: Eyes, Alphonse Bertillon, ca. 1909
The archive is not simply a petrified collection of documents from the past. In both Sebald and Zambreno, archival materials are utilised as fragments to be rearranged and reinterpreted. Letters, photographs, notebooks and quotations from both theoretical and literary sources are brought into new contexts. The archive functions less as a repository than it does as a site of construction in which past fragments are renewed and reorganised in conjunction with present conditions.
Kate Zambreno
In the newspaper, photographs of ditches
being dug at Hart’s Island, the historic
potter’s field, unmarked graves stacked
like blocks. […] Thousands of those who
died of AIDS were buried there, dug by
Riker’s Island inmates, who are now also
dying of this virus, trapped in obscenely
unsanitary conditions as the virus
spreads
– Kate Zambreno, To Write As If Already Dead, (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021), p.87
Kate Zambreno’s autofiction/theory writing situates her works in relation to past writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Hervé Guibert through her utilisation of quotations, anecdotal descriptions, notebooks, and acts of reading. Alongside her diaristic entries detailing her daily life in her attempt to write the present, Zambreno explores how literary lives persist across time as a perpetual intertextual dialogue through the process of reading and formal engagement. Rather than treating literary history as distant or complete, Zambreno approaches it as a continuous conversation.
W.G. Sebald
[…] Everything is constantly
lapsing into oblivion with
every extinguished life […], the
history of countless places
and objects which themselves
have no power of memory is
never heard, never described
or passed on.
– W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin Books, 2002), pp.30- 31
W. G. Sebald’s works as part of and in response to the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming the past) movement combine narrative, photography, travel writing, biography, and historical reflection. Sebald’s novels move through landscapes shaped by memory and loss in which personal stories and collective histories intersect to create a distinct assembly of meaning. Sebald’s hybrid forms have become an important point of reference for contemporary writers, such as Zambreno, who are interested in the possibilities of literary montage and the ability of literature to confront historical events in the present.
Literary Inheritence
Figure 5- Front Cover Design from The Pierrot of the Minute, Aubrey Beardsley, 1897
Literature is shaped by acts of inheritance. Such an inheritance extends beyond the bounds of the literary and theoretical canon to the writer’s own personal circumstances. A writer encounters past texts and carries them forward into new historical contexts. In contemporary autofiction, inheritance often appears not as merely influence but as dialogue: a process of reading, citation, recovery, and reconfiguration in which the writer attempts to situate their own work within the literary field. The past survives through its continual reinterpretation.
Photography
Figure 6- Illustration of a camera obscura from Elementary Treatise on Physics, Experimental and Applied, 3rd ed, 1868
Photographs occupy a distinctive place in both Sebald’s and Zambreno’s work. Both writers utilise photographs in the forms of landscapes, archival works, and even self- portraits. These photographs appear as traces of absent moments that, rather than supplementing the text, emphasise the inevitability of mediation. Photographs do not simply preserve the past but mark its spectral absence. Once placed within a narrative, they acquire new meanings through their relation to surrounding texts and images. They become then part of a larger constellation.
Fragment
Figure 7– Wari textile (fragment),The Cleveland Museum of Art, ca. 700-1000
Fragmentation is often simply understood as incompleteness. Yet fragmentary forms in their incomplete nature resist any ultimate closure, thereby resisting totalising systemisation. Instead, such forms generate new meanings through their placement as disparate materials in relation to one another. Zambreno’s writing moves between everyday diary, criticism, memoir, literary history, and image. Instead of producing a single, unified narrative, these fragments are utilised by both Sebald and Zambreno to invite readers to make relational and temporal connections across different times, places, and experiences.
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