This book investigates the crucial question of ‘restitution’ in the work of W. G. Sebald. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplines, with a foreword by his English translator Anthea Bell, the essays collected in this volume place Sebald’s oeuvre within the broader context of European culture in order to better understand his engagement with the ethics of aesthetics.
Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Irish relations, contemporary performance practices and the writings of H. G. Adler, the volume notably returns to the original German texts. The recurring themes identified in the essays – from Sebald’s carefully calibrated syntax to his self-consciousness about ‘genre’, from his interest in liminal spaces to his literal and metaphorical preoccupation with blindness and vision – all suggest that the ‘attempt at restitution’ constitutes the very essence of Sebald’s understanding of literature.
表中的内容
Introduction: ‘A quoi bon la littérature?’
Foreword: translating W. G. Sebald, with and without the author – Anthea Bell
Part I: Translation and style
1. W. G. Sebald’s three-letter word: on the parallel world of the English translations – Arthur Williams
2. Encounter and cry: W. G. Sebald as poet – George Szirtes
3. Unquiet prose: W. G. Sebald and the writing of the negative – Shane Weller
Part II: Texts and contexts
4. Surrealist vertigo in Schwindel. Gefühle.– Jeannette Baxter
5. Memoirs of the blind: W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten – Dora Osborne
6. ‘Like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals’: the theme of the Anglo-Irish in Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt – Helen Finch
7. The ‘Arca Project’: W. G. Sebald’s Corsica – Graeme Gilloch
8. Twisted threads: the entwined narratives of W. G. Sebald and H. G. Adler – Peter Filkins
9. Stations, dark rooms and false worlds in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz – David Darby
Part II: ‘Prose’ and photography
10. Fields of association: W. G. Sebald and contemporary performance practices – Simon Murray
11. Still life, portrait, photograph, narrative in the work of W. G. Sebald – Clive Scott
12. The return of the repressed mother in W. G. Sebald’s fiction – Graley Herren
13. The question of genre in W. G. Sebald’s ‘prose’ (towards a post-memorial literature of restitution) – Russell J. A. Kilbourn
References
Index
关于作者
Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent