Entangled histories and divided audiences: overhearing Joseph Conrad, W. G. Sebald, and Dan Jacobson

ENThis article focuses on specific effects that occur when transnational literary texts encounter diverse readerships that do not share the same historical imaginary. The author highlights a readerly dynamic of ‘overhearing,’ in which readers realize their outsider position within the discourse of a text but also recognize something sufficiently familiar in it to imagine a linkage to their own historical and social position. This dynamic is studied through texts by twentieth-century émigré authors Joseph Conrad and W. G. Sebald as well as by Dan Jacobson, whose memoir on the Lithuanian past of his Jewish family is referenced by Sebald.