Abstract

Literature increasingly deals with marginalized individuals, criticizes dominant structures, uncovers hidden traces from a suppressed past and attempts to restitute the voices of marginalized people. Orhan Pamuk and W. G. Sebald engage with what is considered to be marginal in various ways in their prose: marginal spaces, marginal times, marginalized people and objects are the main subject matters in their works. The empathic engagement with the marginal constitutes a poetic principle in their narratives, in which the marginal is attributed with a specific significance and as a model of knowledge is given ethic-aesthetical value: a poetics of the marginal.