This article will trace the "map-like" quality of W.G. Sebald's novel The Rings of Saturn, and will demonstrate the ways in which this characteristic of Sebald's prose works can assist in ...illuminating the quiet echoes of historical traumas such as the Holocaust that permeate his oeuvre. Fundamentally, however, a normative understanding of mapping is inadequate to the complexities of Sebald's meditations on history, memory, place, and destruction; accordingly, the article will complicate such understandings by presenting the novel as a kind of "fluid cartography." The mutability inherent in the notion of fluid cartography is apt to Sebald's writing, and can offer an enhanced understanding of the author's methods of representing memory and the past, along with the ways in which such concerns become embedded in the landscapes depicted. This article will focus on aspects of Holocaust memory that are inserted in such a way, and which become connected - through the fluid cartographical reach of the text - to a broader history of both human and natural destruction.
In fieldwork, the collection of qualitative empirical data is almost exclusively carried out on foot. When we study a ‘field’, it also suggests a terrain or an environment that we are meant to ...investigate. Yet the actual process of investigating something ‘on foot’, of walking, is seldom reflected on in any detail. The aim of this essay is to consider what this notion of investigating a field ‘on foot’ might mean for socio-legal scholarship. It focuses on the ways in which author WG Sebald’s walks in the Suffolk landscape, as portrayed in his novel The Rings of Saturn (1995), provide sensory stimuli for his meditations on themes such as the passing of time and identity. Sebald’s notion of walking is traced Claude Lévi-Strauss’ idea of bricolage as a form of ‘patchwork’ knowledge formation, but the hybridity of Sebald’s resulting ‘fieldnotes’ suggest a closer affiliation with Walter Benjamin’s notion of constellation.
In Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald uses the concept of the Roche limit--the nearest a satellite can come to the object it orbits without being consumed by that object's gravity-to draw a boundary around ...human suffering so that in bearing witness, we shall not be destroyed.By using lists to create literary fractals--geometric designs that are self-similar at a fractional dimension--Sebald dramatizes that limit as an equilibrium that art must hold between distance from and proximity to human suffering. He asks readers not merely to bear witness but to find the proximity at which we can hold a steady gaze, unflinching, without being consumed by that suffering. At the Roche limit, we are bound by what we see but not consumed.
This essay argues that any critical engagement with the literary writings of W. G. Sebald requires a thorough understanding of both contemporary German cultural history as well as his largely ...untranslated critical corpus. I further contend that scholars who lack proficiency in German are disadvantaged because they are barred not only from a wealth of research and scholarship but also from unpublished papers at the German Literary Archives in Marbach. My argument is supported by a case study at the end of the essay that explores an overlooked facet of Sebald’s writing in German—namely, the persistent use of the word Neger, which translates as both “Negro” and “nigger” but has been silently neutralized in English translation.
This essay proposes that W. G. Sebald’s distinctive contribution to the global novel is his reordering of the space of representation. This reordering is both literal and metaphorical. It is literal, ...in the sense that Sebald sets his work within actual spaces: the pages upon which his novels are written as much as the landscape being traversed by his narrator. It is metaphorical, in the sense that Sebald explores a set of imaginary spaces nested within each other: those occupied by his characters, who inhabit several worlds simultaneously, and that allocated to the narrative voice, which speaks to us out of a clearly demarcated yet unlocatable place. The result is not a troubling of the boundary between the real and the fictional, as many of his critics have contended, but a reflection on how the past continues to shape the present, forming the real and imaginative coordinates of our world.
The introduction to this special issue of boundary 2 examines W. G. Sebald’s rapid and sudden transformation from controversial and curmudgeonly Germanist to literary superstar as a case study in the ...“global valences of the critical.” The massive success of Sebald’s strange and variegated oeuvre among critics highlights a pervasive and troubling provincialism afflicting this supposedly global moment in world cultural history. Using Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the author links the emergence of “distant” modes of reading to drone warfare and concludes by calling for greater emphasis on literary translation.
This essay reads “As Day and Night,” an essay W. G. Sebald wrote about artist and friend Jan Peter Tripp, as a complex and multilayered commentary on the role of both written and visual texts in the ...author’s oeuvre. It draws on Sebald’s Austerlitz as well as the work of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for the centrality of the human gaze in Sebald’s imagination. The human gaze forges a unique form of realism in Sebald, playing a central role in revealing the “metaphysical underside” of objects, which in turn provokes an ethical response in the reader-viewer.
W. G. Sebald is one of the most original and significant authors of the twentieth century, but these credentials only make The Rings of Saturn that much more disappointing. In his other novels, ...Sebald’s drift between landscapes and encyclopedic fragments emerged out of a deep necessity and constituted an ingenious literary innovation. But here this style exists in a void. When an author becomes enslaved to his own style, when form is empty of content, the result is not merely boring. In his previous books, Sebald was a great writer of the German trauma, but in The Rings of Saturn he makes that national trauma banal.
This essay discusses the role of photographs in Sebald’s Austerlitz. The author argues that photographs constitute a crucial paratext to the entire narrative, making possible the representation of ...traumatic memories through “the bricolage of words and images.” Engaging with Freudian psychoanalysis and Roland Barthes’s theory on photography, the author demonstrates how the process of retrieving memories and recovering from trauma can be achieved through “bricolage.” In doing so, this essay sheds light on the unique narratology conveyed through Sebald’s quasi-realistic lens.
Abstract
This article examines Jurek Becker's 1976 novel
Der Boxer
and W. G. Sebald's critical essay on Becker “Ich möchte zu ihnen hinabsteigen und finde den Weg nicht. Zu den Romanen Jurek Beckers” ...(posthumously published in 2010) to show how they reflect the changing norms of Holocaust testimony in German literature. Becker's well‐received novel narrates the refusal of a traumatized Jewish survivor to conform to the normative expectations of Holocaust testimony in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Sebald's essay, written in the early 1990s, however, accuses the novel of being inauthentic and by implication unethical. The polemic demonstrates Sebald's attempt to establish norms of Holocaust representation in the period following the
Wende
. Becker's novel and Sebald's response to it shed light on restrictive norms and expectations that surrounded Jewish survivor testimony to the Holocaust, both in the GDR during the 1970s and in post‐unification Germany of the early 1990s.
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