Landscape and Subjectivity in the Work of Patrick Keiller, W.G. Sebald, and Iain Sinclair

by Anderson, David

• ISBN13: 9780198847199
• ISBN10: 019884719X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780192586476
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2020-10-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book situates the film-maker Patrick Keiller alongside the writers W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair as the three leading voices in 'English psychogeography', offering new insights to key works including London, The Rings of Saturn, and Lights Out for the Territory. Excavating social and political contexts while also providing plentiful close analysis, it examines the cultivation of a distinctive 'affective' mode or sensibility especially attuned to the cultural anxieties of the twentieth century's closing decades.

Landscape and Subjectivity explores motifs including essayism, the reconciliation of creativity with market forces, and the foregrounding of an often agonised or melancholic. It asks whether the work can, collectively, be seen to constitute a 'critical theory of contemporary space' and suggests that Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair's contributions represent a highly significant moment in English culture's engagement with landscape, environment, and itself.

The book's analyses are fuelled by archival and topographical research and are responsive to various interdisciplinary contexts, including the tradition of the 'English Journey', the set of ideas associated with the 'spatial turn', critical theory, the so-called 'heritage debate', and more recent theorisation of the 'anthropocene'.

Author Biography

David Anderson, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Queen Mary University of London

David Anderson is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests encompass Anglo-German cultural relations as well as representations of London in literature and film. He has recently been engaged as a Research Associate in UCL's Urban Laboratory, co-curating the symposium and screening series City, Essay, Film.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Camera-I: Patrick Keiller's Early Short Films and Essays
2. A Vagrant Sensibility: Patrick Keiller's Robinson Films
3. W.G. Sebald's Early Writing: 'A European At The End of European Civilization'
4. An English Pilgrim: Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz
5. Iain Sinclair's Early Writing: The Arcane Scholarship of Place
6. Crosses, Circles, and Madness: Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital, and Edge of the Orison
Conclusion