David Anderson
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198847199
- eISBN:
- 9780191882104
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198847199.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Peter Dula
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195395037
- eISBN:
- 9780199894451
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195395037.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, 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 ...
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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
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.
Kevin Brazil
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198824459
- eISBN:
- 9780191863240
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198824459.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Lisa Saltzman
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226242033
- eISBN:
- 9780226242170
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226242170.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
David Anderson
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198847199
- eISBN:
- 9780191882104
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198847199.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Mary Jacobus
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226390666
- eISBN:
- 9780226390680
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226390680.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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. ...
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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
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.
Lecia Rosenthal
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823233977
- eISBN:
- 9780823241200
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233977.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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. ...
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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
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.
Adrian Daub
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816674695
- eISBN:
- 9781452947518
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816674695.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
Anne Whitehead
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748618576
- eISBN:
- 9780748651726
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748618576.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Lecia Rosenthal
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823233977
- eISBN:
- 9780823241200
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233977.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. ...
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This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, the book engages the century's signal preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. Fascinated with the threat of apocalypse, the century proliferates the spectacle of world-ending as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with recent discussions of the century's passion for the real, and taking on the century's late aesthetics of subtraction, the book reads the century's obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between the current interest in the category of trauma and the tradition of the sublime, it reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics of the breaking-point from the lens of a late sublime.Less
This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, the book engages the century's signal preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. Fascinated with the threat of apocalypse, the century proliferates the spectacle of world-ending as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with recent discussions of the century's passion for the real, and taking on the century's late aesthetics of subtraction, the book reads the century's obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between the current interest in the category of trauma and the tradition of the sublime, it reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics of the breaking-point from the lens of a late sublime.
Thomas S. Davis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231169424
- eISBN:
- 9780231537889
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169424.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226808550
- eISBN:
- 9780226808796
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226808796.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
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 ...
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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
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.
J .J. Long
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633876
- eISBN:
- 9780748651757
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633876.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
W. G. Sebald is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant writers to have emerged onto the global literary scene in recent decades, and is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Nabokov, ...
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W. G. Sebald is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant writers to have emerged onto the global literary scene in recent decades, and is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Nabokov, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Proust, and Primo Levi. This book offers an original reading of Sebald's oeuvre, arguing that his work is concerned first and foremost with the problem of modernity. It focuses in particular on the numerous archival institutions and processes that lie at the very heart of modernity and are repeatedly thematised throughout Sebald's work. Adopting a broad definition of the archive to encompass a wide range of material practices, the book analyses the function of photography, museums, libraries, and other systems of knowledge to which Sebald's texts obsessively return. Following Foucault, such systems are seen as central to the exercise of power and the constitution of subjectivity in modernity. By undertaking a differentiated analysis which is attuned to the formal complexities of Sebald's texts, the book shows that Sebald's engagement with structures of power-knowledge is characterised by a melancholy struggle to assert autonomous selfhood in the face of the institutional and discursive determinants of subjectivity.Less
W. G. Sebald is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant writers to have emerged onto the global literary scene in recent decades, and is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Nabokov, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Proust, and Primo Levi. This book offers an original reading of Sebald's oeuvre, arguing that his work is concerned first and foremost with the problem of modernity. It focuses in particular on the numerous archival institutions and processes that lie at the very heart of modernity and are repeatedly thematised throughout Sebald's work. Adopting a broad definition of the archive to encompass a wide range of material practices, the book analyses the function of photography, museums, libraries, and other systems of knowledge to which Sebald's texts obsessively return. Following Foucault, such systems are seen as central to the exercise of power and the constitution of subjectivity in modernity. By undertaking a differentiated analysis which is attuned to the formal complexities of Sebald's texts, the book shows that Sebald's engagement with structures of power-knowledge is characterised by a melancholy struggle to assert autonomous selfhood in the face of the institutional and discursive determinants of subjectivity.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846318214
- eISBN:
- 9781846317736
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846317736.004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
J. J. Long
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633876
- eISBN:
- 9780748651757
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633876.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
David James
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- July 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198789758
- eISBN:
- 9780191831447
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198789758.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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’.
Uwe Schütte
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780746312988
- eISBN:
- 9781789629415
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9780746312988.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
W. G. Sebald was a literary phenomenon: a German literary scholar working in England, who took up creative writing out of dissatisfaction with German post-war letters. Within only a few years, his ...
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W. G. Sebald was a literary phenomenon: a German literary scholar working in England, who took up creative writing out of dissatisfaction with German post-war letters. Within only a few years, his unique prose books made him one of the most celebrated authors of the late twentieth-century.Sebald died prematurely, aged 57, after the publication of his most celebrated prose fiction Austerlitz. This accessible critical introduction, written by a leading expert, highlights Sebald’s double role as writer and academic. It discusses his oeuvre in the order in which his works were published in German in order to offer a deeper understanding of the original development of his literary writings. In addition to concise but incisive interpretations of the main publications, Schütte demonstrates how Sebald’s critical writings (most of which still await translation) fed into his literary texts and concludes his study with a perceptive assessment of Sebald as a cult author.Less
W. G. Sebald was a literary phenomenon: a German literary scholar working in England, who took up creative writing out of dissatisfaction with German post-war letters. Within only a few years, his unique prose books made him one of the most celebrated authors of the late twentieth-century.Sebald died prematurely, aged 57, after the publication of his most celebrated prose fiction Austerlitz. This accessible critical introduction, written by a leading expert, highlights Sebald’s double role as writer and academic. It discusses his oeuvre in the order in which his works were published in German in order to offer a deeper understanding of the original development of his literary writings. In addition to concise but incisive interpretations of the main publications, Schütte demonstrates how Sebald’s critical writings (most of which still await translation) fed into his literary texts and concludes his study with a perceptive assessment of Sebald as a cult author.
Alfred Thomas
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226795409
- eISBN:
- 9780226795416
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226795416.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Alison Garden
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621815
- eISBN:
- 9781800341678
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Discontinued
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621815.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
Ben Hutchinson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198767695
- eISBN:
- 9780191821578
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767695.003.0019
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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 ...
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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
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).