W. G. Sebald

by Sebald, W. G.

• ISBN13: 9783110182743
• ISBN10: 3110182742
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-30
• Publisher: De Gruyter

Summary

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 The book includes a previously unpublished interview with Sebald from 1998.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

Foreword: The Sebald Phenomenon	p. 1
Introduction: Two Languages, Two Audiences: The Tandem Literary CEuvres of W. G. Sebald	p. 7
Introduction and Transcript of an Interview given by Max Sebald (Interviewer: Michael Zeeman)	p. 21
Contexts & Influences
Kafka, Nabokov ... Sebald: Intertextuality and Narratives of Redemption in Vertigo and The Emigrants	p. 33
Sebald's Pathographies	p. 65
Sebald's Elective and Other Affinities	p. 77
In the Weavers' Web: An Intertextual Approach to W.G. Sebald and Laurence Sterne	p. 91
Sebald's Kafka	p. 105
Sebald's Amateurs	p. 127
Narrative and Style
"A Time He Could Not Bear to Say Any More About": Presence and Absence of the Narrator in W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants	p. 141
The Task of the Narrator: Moments of Symbolic Investiture in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz	p. 157
"Egg boxes stacked in a crate": Narrative Status and its Implications	p. 171
Speak no Evil, Write no Evil: In Search of a Usable Language of Destruction	p. 183
On Exposure: Photography and Uncanny Memory in W.G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz	p. 205
Realism, Photography, and Degrees of Uncertainty	p. 219
History and Trauma
The Dystopian Entwinement of Histories and Identities in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz	p. 233
Transcripts: An Ethics of Representation in The Emigrants	p. 251
Landscape and Memory: Sebald's Redemption of History	p. 265
The Holocaust as the Still Point of the World in W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants	p. 279
W.G. Sebald's Twentieth-Century Histories	p. 291
Going Astray: Melancholy, Natural History, and the Image of Exile in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz	p. 301
No Foothold: Institutions and Buildings in W.G. Sebald's Prose	p. 315
The Experience of Destruction: W.G. Sebald, the Airwar, and Literature	p. 335
W.G. Sebald and Structures of Testimony and Trauma: There are Spots of Mist That No Eye can Dispel	p. 351
Short Titles and Abbreviations used in this Volume	p. 365
Works Cited	p. 367
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