W. G. Sebald

The German author W. G. Sebald was a master of the fiction of recollection and observation, often exploring the reverberations of World War II on the personal and collective memories of Germans and Jews. Yet while literary scholars have identified a number of subjects in his novels-the Holocaust, trauma and memory, melancholy, photography, travel, intertextuality, and the nature and meaning of home-they have yet to tie these topics to the broader historical trajectories with which...
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The German author W. G. Sebald was a master of the fiction of recollection and observation, often exploring the reverberations of World War II on the personal and collective memories of Germans and Jews. Yet while literary scholars have identified a number of subjects in his novels-the Holocaust, trauma and memory, melancholy, photography, travel, intertextuality, and the nature and meaning of home-they have yet to tie these topics to the broader historical trajectories with which Sebald's work is fundamentally concerned. In W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, J. J. Long identifies a wider "meta-problem" in Sebald-the problem of modernity. The numerous archival institutions and processes that lie at the heart of modernity are repeatedly explored in his novels, and photography, museums, libraries, and other institutions for producing and preserving knowledge are among his main obsessions. Long sees these systems as central to the exercise of power and the constitution of subjectivity, themes embodied in Sebald's melancholy search for autonomous selfhood. Considering the evocation of wonder in the prose narratives of Vertigo, the use of family albums in The Emigrants, the ambulatory narrative in The Rings of Saturn, and the archival subject in Austerlitz, Long advances a highly original interpretation of the author's oeuvre, casting Sebald's project as a response not only to post-Holocaust trauma but also to the longer history of modernity.