W. G. Sebald

History - Memory - Trauma

Scott Denham, Mark McCulloh, Scott Denham, Mark McCulloh

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9783110182743
• eBook ISBN: 9783110201949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The novelist, poet, and essayist W. G. Sebald (1944 – 2001) was perhaps the most original German writer of the last decade of the 20th century ("Die Ausgewanderten", "Austerlitz", "Luftkrieg und Literatur"). His writing is marked by a unique 'hybridity' that combines characteristics of travelogue, cultural criticism, crime story, historical essay, and dream diary, among other genres. He employs layers of literary and motion picture allusions that contribute to a sometimes enigmatic, sometimes intimately familiar mood; his dominant mode is melancholy. The contributions of this anthology examine W. G. Sebald as narrator and pensive observer of history. The book includes a previously unpublished interview with Sebald from 1998.

Table of contents

• Frontmatter
• Table of Contents
• Foreword: The Sebald Phenomenon
• Introduction: Two Languages, Two Audiences: The Tandem Literary OEuvres of W.G. Sebald
• Introduction and Transcript of an interview given by Max Sebald
• Kafka, Nabokov … Sebald: Intertextuality and Narratives of Redemption in Vertigo and The Emigrants
• Sebald’s Pathographies
• Sebald’s Elective and Other Affinities
• In the Weavers’ Web: An Intertextual Approachto W.G. Sebald and Laurence Sterne
• Sebald’s Kafka
• Sebald’s Amateurs
• “A Time He Could Not Bear to Say Any More About”: Presence and Absence of the Narrator in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants
• The Task of the Narrator: Moments of Symbolic Investiture in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
• “Egg boxes stacked in a crate”: Narrative Status and its Implications
• Speak no Evil, Write no Evil: In Search of a Usable Language of Destruction
• On Exposure: Photography and Uncanny Memory in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz
• Realism, Photography,and Degrees of Uncertainty
• The Dystopian Entwinement of Histories and Identities in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
• Transcripts: An Ethics of Representation in The Emigrants
• Landscape and Memory: Sebald’s Redemption of History
• The Holocaust as the Still Point of the World in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants
• W.G. Sebald’s Twentieth-Century Histories
• Going Astray: Melancholy, Natural History, and the Image of Exile in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
• No Foothold. Institutions and Buildings in W.G. Sebald’s Prose
• The Experience of Destruction: W.G. Sebald, the Airwar, and Literature
• W.G. Sebald and Structures of Testimony and Trauma: There are Spots of Mist That No Eye can Dispel
• Backmatter