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Art’s Swindle: W. G. Sebald and History After Trauma

Kevin Brazil

in Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

In a 1992 interview W. G. Sebald remarked that ‘I myself work like a painter who has to consider how big to make the frame. The painter’s craft has always fascinated me’. This chapter traces what ... More

In a 1992 interview W. G. Sebald remarked that ‘I myself work like a painter who has to consider how big to make the frame. The painter’s craft has always fascinated me’. This chapter traces what Sebald understood by working like a painter in fiction, arguing that he used painting as a counterpoint to explore the limitations of the photographs used throughout what he called his ‘semi-documentary prose fictions’—and the limitations of photography as a model of historical memory. It moves from a discussion of visual aesthetics in Sebald’s unpublished PhD on Döblin and his often overlooked art criticism to argue that Sebald conceptualized the photograph as a visual readymade, and that this modernist approach to photography informs the treatment of historical memory in The Emigrants and Austerlitz.Less

An English Pilgrim: Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz

David Anderson

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

If, as Salman Rushdie has written (in an essay on Günter Grass), ‘the migrant is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century’, then Chapter 4, ‘An English Pilgrim:?Sebald’s The ... More

If, as Salman Rushdie has written (in an essay on Günter Grass), ‘the migrant is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century’, then Chapter 4, ‘An English Pilgrim:?Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz’, explores how Sebald depicts spaces scored by both his own migration to England and that of the Jewish refugees he encounters there. Placing Sebald’s work into dialogue with itself (polemical texts like On the Natural History of Destruction) and with regional history texts like Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield (1969), this chapter examines how Sebald’s East Anglia becomes an exemplary setting for his saturnine account of the ‘natural history of destruction’ as well as his problematic depiction of ‘heritage’ spaces in The Rings of Saturn (1995). It goes on to show how Austerlitz (2001) frames its depictions of England within a network of other locations including Brussels, Prague, Paris, Marienbad (Czech Republic), and North Wales, cultivating a thickened sense of space and place by way of the profound and moving friendship that it recounts between Sebald’s narrator and the fictional Jacques Austerlitz.Less

Private Languages

Peter Dula

in Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology

This chapter explores the fiction of W. G. Sebald in order to illustrate skepticism and the companionship Cavell and Sebald think should be a response to it. Many of Sebald's characters may be ... More

This chapter explores the fiction of W. G. Sebald in order to illustrate skepticism and the companionship Cavell and Sebald think should be a response to it. Many of Sebald's characters may be understood to be in the grip of the variety of skepticism which Wittgenstein called the private language fantasy. The companionship that Sebald's narrator provides to these characters helps to illuminate the alternative Cavell provides to both MacIntyre and liberalism.Less

Orphans: On Émigrés and Images in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

Lisa Saltzman

in Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects

Chapter two examines W.G. Sebald’s last work of prose fiction, Austerlitz, a novel which dramatizes the profound role that photographs plays for its protagonist, a Welsh child who only belatedly ... More

Chapter two examines W.G. Sebald’s last work of prose fiction, Austerlitz, a novel which dramatizes the profound role that photographs plays for its protagonist, a Welsh child who only belatedly comes to know his actual identity as a child of the Kindertransport. Exiles and émigrés all, the subjects of Sebald’s literary imagination reach for photographs as if for moorings. And yet, the subjects of Sebald’s fictional histories and historical fictions experience themselves as not so much anchored by the photographs that accompany their stories as cut adrift. Turning to sources as various as the nostalgia, multi-media practice of the contemporary British artist Tacita Dean and the deracinated image-theory and pictorial inheritance of Aby Warburg and his Mnemosyne Atlas, the chapter proposes that we might begin to understand something of the role of photographic images in Sebald’s hybrid fictions if we think about the question of Nachleben, of afterlife, of survival in both historical and art historical terms.Less

“He could tell you things! Things I’ve tried to forget; things I never did know”: Conrad, Sebald and spectres of imperialism

Alison Garden

in The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016

The relationship between Casement and Conrad has long fascinated many, with W.G. Sebald fictionalising their meeting in The Rings of Saturn (1998) as part of the text’s engagement with Conrad’s ... More

The relationship between Casement and Conrad has long fascinated many, with W.G. Sebald fictionalising their meeting in The Rings of Saturn (1998) as part of the text’s engagement with Conrad’s novella and archival trail. For Sebald, Casement galvanises a set of interlinked preoccupations: the catastrophes of modernity, state-sponsored violence, the fragility of memory and the unavoidable spectre of history. Tracing the dialogue between these two works - embodied by Casement’s ghost - enables us to read the metamodernist aesthetics of Sebald as a form of ghostly intertextual memory, indicative of the post-imperial debris that continues to haunt our contemporary moment. Reading Heart of Darkness through The Rings of Saturn opens up both texts in enabling, fruitful ways; just as reading Casement through Conrad’s archive provides us with novel ways of reading the two men and Conrad’s work.Less

W.G. Sebald’s Early Writing: ‘A European at the End of European Civilization’

David Anderson

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

Chapter 3, ‘W.G. Sebald’s Early Writing: “A European at the End of European Civilization”’, begins by reading the long poem After Nature (1988) as one version of what Markus Zisselsberger has called ... More

Chapter 3, ‘W.G. Sebald’s Early Writing: “A European at the End of European Civilization”’, begins by reading the long poem After Nature (1988) as one version of what Markus Zisselsberger has called Sebald’s ‘original journey’ from the Allgaü region of southern Germany to Manchester in the 1960s. It discusses and critiques his depiction of the city in that poem as well as ‘Max Ferber’ (the final story of 1996’s The Emigrants) and his early poem ‘Bleston. A Mancunian Cantical’ (1967). Reading these works, and their representation of Manchester, in light of Susan Sontag’s comments on Sebald as ‘a European at the end of European civilization’, the chapter shows how Sebald’s work combines fictional and factual histories to produce a rich texturology of place. At the same time, tracing Sebald’s work with the damaged histories of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, it stages his work in the context of Theodor Adorno’s famous comment on the ‘barbarism’ of writing poetry after Auschwitz.Less

Pastoral, after History: The Apple Orchard

Mary Jacobus

in Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud

The pastoral happens always after an event in history, where the meanings of what has passed flare up in the present, or else deliberately dulls and blurs it. Pastoral engages questions of history. ... More

The pastoral happens always after an event in history, where the meanings of what has passed flare up in the present, or else deliberately dulls and blurs it. Pastoral engages questions of history. In order to explore this, this chapter examines Seamus Heaney’s translation of Rilke’s poems “The Apple Orchard” and “After the Fire.” W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, on the other hand, speaks of the author’s visit to poet-translator Michael Hamburger, whose orchard and autobiographical memoir are interwoven with Sebald’s hybrid, quasi-fictionalized narrative. In these works, as in others mentioned in the chapter, pastoral is shown to be a form of historical knowledge that emerges in the wake of destruction. Pastoral should be differentiated with nostalgia, however, in that pastorals are necessarily “after history” because they are relocated in the historical present.Less

On the Late Sublime: W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn

Lecia Rosenthal

in Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation

In the late 1970s, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched the twin Voyager space vehicles, the interplanetary mission carried a truly far-out, indefinitely addressed envoi. ... More

In the late 1970s, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched the twin Voyager space vehicles, the interplanetary mission carried a truly far-out, indefinitely addressed envoi. One of the critiques of the sublime after Auschwitz emerges out of the contradiction between the sight of images of horror and the idea that such images should produce the questionable gain of merely telling us, over and over again, that we cannot do more than present the limitations of representation, or “the unpresentable within presentation itself.” The Rings of Saturn situates itself somewhere on the outskirts of the world and genre, tracing in departure the literary-terrestrial terrains of the travel diary, recollections of the walking tour, memoir of a life beyond. Sebald's aesthetics mixes the sublime with the naive.Less

Sphinxes without Secrets: W. G. Sebald’s Albums and the Aesthetics of Photographic Exchange

Adrian Daub

in On Writing with Photography

This chapter focuses on the dynamic interactions instituted between W. G. Sebald’s writing and photographs, creating a false dichotomy that implies perfect interpenetration of word and image on one ... More

This chapter focuses on the dynamic interactions instituted between W. G. Sebald’s writing and photographs, creating a false dichotomy that implies perfect interpenetration of word and image on one hand, and absolute privileging of the written word on the other. It considers the third part of Sebald’s book The Emigrants, which contains the biography of Ambros Adelwarth, Sebald’s great uncle. The Emigrants describes homosexuality as a tension between promise and catastrophe, and viewed through a visual and historically structured intertext.Less

The butterfly man: trauma and repetition in the writing of W. G. Sebald

Anne Whitehead

in Trauma Fiction

This chapter discusses W.G. Sebald's writing. It observes that his novels insistently feature photographs and descriptions of smoking chimneys and railway stations, which reveal the extent to which ... More

This chapter discusses W.G. Sebald's writing. It observes that his novels insistently feature photographs and descriptions of smoking chimneys and railway stations, which reveal the extent to which the Holocaust fills people's everyday consciousness and lives. The chapter shows that Sebald's writing explores the critical traces of Romanticism, and tries to determine whether this writing conflates the concepts of providence and fate with the discourse of trauma. It also states that Sebald reminds readers that there are some features of knowledge which remain beyond their grasp.Less

Epilogue: “Appointments to Keep in the Past”

Thomas S. Davis

in The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

In these closing pages I look at W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and consider the possible afterlife of the outward turn, of the prolonged existence of a technique after its period of emergence and ... More

In these closing pages I look at W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and consider the possible afterlife of the outward turn, of the prolonged existence of a technique after its period of emergence and relevance would seem to have closed.Less

“They are Ever Returning to Us, the Dead”: The Novels of W. G. Sebald

in The War Complex: World War II in Our Time

Sebald perceives the Holocaust as a profound recent historical catastrophe, even as a “unique” event that marks an important “before and after” in human history. But he also perceives it as an ... More

Sebald perceives the Holocaust as a profound recent historical catastrophe, even as a “unique” event that marks an important “before and after” in human history. But he also perceives it as an emblematic event for European modernity—one possible consequence of the ordered, “sanitary,” industrialism so fascinating to Austerlitz. At the same time, he perceives it as the disaster that crystallizes most completely for our time the common, but profound human catastrophe: to be caught in time, which will obliterate all that can be accomplished in time, even the arduous work of memory. The process can be slow and gradual, quick and surprising, natural or manmade. But it is always most terrible—arbitrary and avoidable and obeying no natural law—when it is manmade.Less

Unhomely Travels; or, the Haunts of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald

in Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing

This chapter examines how the travelogues of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald thematically explore and stylistically convey the liminality and in-betweenness of spectral presences. It focuses on ... More

This chapter examines how the travelogues of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald thematically explore and stylistically convey the liminality and in-betweenness of spectral presences. It focuses on Marlatt's Ghost Works and Sebald's Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn. It discusses the plot of these works and suggests that innovative travel narratives of Marlatt and Sebald are emblematic of a cultural shift in modes and media of textual production that illustrates the concern to push the boundaries of generic and textual responses to travel.Less

Introduction

J. J. Long

in W. G. Sebald - Image, Archive, Modernity

This introductory chapter discusses W.G. Sebald, who has become one of Germany's most-written-about authors. It looks at the ways modernity is thematised his writings, studies his ‘Holocaust ... More

This introductory chapter discusses W.G. Sebald, who has become one of Germany's most-written-about authors. It looks at the ways modernity is thematised his writings, studies his ‘Holocaust literature’, and reveals that Sebald scholars have begun to observe that the thematisation of the Holocaust in his work goes together with a deep concern for the longer history of modernity. The chapter then discusses the characteristics, question, and media of memory, along with the connection between melancholy and modernity, and finally discusses the main focus of the book.Less

Description as Redress

David James

in Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation

This chapter examines the poetics and ethics of literary description as mode of redress in traumatic fictions that evoke seemingly indescribable circumstances. It discusses the affective energy of ... More

This chapter examines the poetics and ethics of literary description as mode of redress in traumatic fictions that evoke seemingly indescribable circumstances. It discusses the affective energy of style as it counterpoints catastrophe and suffering in the work of Cormac McCarthy and W. G. Sebald. In so doing, the chapter poses larger questions that establish some of the book’s principal interpretive coordinates. Namely, can expression compensate for plot? What ethical implications does the brilliant description of devastation in The Road (2006) and Austerlitz (2001) magnify, when athletic acts of depiction counterweigh the material or mental damage they elegantly convey? Behaving as such, how does literary style probe as much as it affirms its own consolatory affordances? Over the course the chapter, description emerges as a form of narration in its own right. And the importance of reading for description highlights the need to distinguish this kind of analytical attention from the proposed aims of so-called ‘descriptive reading’.Less

Sailing to Bohemia: Utopia, Memory, and the Holocaust in Postwar Austrian and German Writing

Alfred Thomas

in Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City

Turning from interwar French responses to Prague, this chapter examines the elegiac treatment of the city as a site of nostalgia in postwar German and Austrian literature. Writers who represented ... More

Turning from interwar French responses to Prague, this chapter examines the elegiac treatment of the city as a site of nostalgia in postwar German and Austrian literature. Writers who represented this treatment include the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan; the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who left her native Austria and finally settled in Italy; and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, who spent most of his career in England. Enforced or self-imposed exiles from their origins, all these writers envision Prague as a second Heimat. Their experience of Prague is therefore nostalgic, an act of identification with a lost Heimat. In highlighting Prague's function as a space of the imagination, they tacitly acknowledge that the city is above all else a site of writing in which the fulfillment of desire is constantly postponed and therefore a permanent source of utopian hope. In part this was a response to the fact that Prague was one of the few central European cities to survive the destruction of World War II. But insofar as its Jewish population did not and its German inhabitants were expelled soon afterward, the city also becomes a site of memory and mourning, in particular for Celan, whose mother had fled to Bohemia from a Russian pogrom in 1915 and who was murdered by the Nazis.Less

Epilogue: The Vertigo of Lateness

Ben Hutchinson

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

The Epilogue summarizes the argument of the book in terms of its reconception of modern European literature as ‘late’. Placing this argument in the context of both late modernism and postmodernism—as ... More

The Epilogue summarizes the argument of the book in terms of its reconception of modern European literature as ‘late’. Placing this argument in the context of both late modernism and postmodernism—as well as that of the postwar emergence of comparative literature as a discipline—it focuses on the work of W.G. Sebald as an example of the ‘vertigo’ of the contemporary perspective. Haunted by modernity, Sebald’s dense prose style suggests not just the writing of lateness, but also writing as lateness; it thus raises the stakes of Adorno’s definition of late works as ‘catastrophes’ beyond the individual artist’s life (late style), beyond even a particular epoch (late modernism), to modernity as a whole (lateness).Less