This is the second of four posts on W.G. Sebald in Context, which came out last September. It contains thirty-eight essays on Sebald by specialists from across Europe, Great Britain, the Middle East, and the United States. The volume was edited by Uwe Schütte, who studied under Sebald, knew him well, and is now widely recognized as one of the most respected Sebald scholars. If you are interested in Sebald at all, this is an important book that succinctly covers nearly every aspect of his life, career, and writings. It’s a terrific starting point to learn more about Sebald, since the writing is very accessible and the essays are short, as each was limited to 3,500 words. The volume is divided into four sections: Biographical Aspects, The Literary Works, Themes and Influences, and Reception and Legacy. The second section consists of nine essays covering Sebald’s Literary Works.
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. Melissa Etzler covers the handful of Sebald’s surviving unpublished juvenilia, which includes several very short stories, a six-page play, and an unpublished novel. These works from the 1960s “foreshadow the philosophical, historical and sociological considerations in his mature prose fiction,” Etzler writes.
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. Many Sebald readers might be surprised to learn that some of his first serious writing projects were two film scripts about the lives of philosophers—one on Immanuel Kant, the other on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although both were left unfinished and unproduced, Michael Hutchins says they “bear the same thematic and aesthetic imprint as his later work.” These were Sebald’s earliest attempts to find and fund a life outside of academia, which he was finding “extremely unpleasant” under the increased bureaucracy placed on universities by the government of Margaret Thatcher. (Sebald taught at the University of East Anglia from 1970 until his death in 2001.)
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. The year 1986 seems to have marked a “fresh and decisive departure in Sebald’s oeuvre,” according to Paul Whitehead, who writes about his Prose Project. According to a grant application that he had submitted in February 1987, Sebald had already begun work on the book that would become Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo) in 1990, his first published book of prose fiction. Parts of this Prose Project, as Sebald called it, were also split off to become the germ of his next book, Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), published in 1992.
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. Nearly all Sebald’s books involve the writing of a biography or some aspect of his own autobiography. Christopher Singer examines how Sebald “complicates” this tendency toward Auto-/Biography by “merging fact and fiction, author- and narrative personas, memory and history, past and present.”
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. “One of the enduring intellectual appeals of his work twenty years after his untimely death is related to the rigour with which he renders ecological disasters as a literary theme.” Bernhard Malkmus explores the various ways in which Sebald uses Natural History and the Anthropocene in his books.
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. In 1995 and 1996, Sebald traveled to the French island of Corsica in the Mediterranean for research, and he began writing on his Corsica Project. But only a year later, he mysteriously stopped working on it. In the manuscript that he left behind, he wrote that he believed that Corsicans lived as though they were “pervaded through and through by the fear of death.” Lisa Kunze believes that “the rationale for this fear is firstly that, on Corsica, the landscape is steeped in the reality of nature’s formidable force. [Sebald’s] narrator becomes personally aware of this on his repeated hiking excursions across the island; it is the ‘fear of abandonment in the world’ and the ‘suspicion that one cannot do the slightest thing against the known quality of nature’.”
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. Sebald “wrote and published poetry from his early twenties until shortly before his death.” Iain Galbraith looks at the themes of his poetry: “history, nature, destruction, the Holocaust, landscapes, time, the gaze, memory, surfaces, texts, borders, journeys (mostly by train), half-way or inconclusive states, concealed orders, hearsay, astrology, arcane signs and symbols, myth and legend, and, perhaps most conspicuous of all, absences.”
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. In 2000, Sebald applied for and received a United Kingdom-funded grant to undertake a World War Project. Before his death, he had already traveled to France and Germany doing research for what he wrote would be a work of “semi-documentary prose fiction.” Richard Hibbit has studied the research files and manuscripts that remain and writes that Sebald had researched European conflicts from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to the Second World War., in which his father served as a German soldier in Poland.
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. “From 1990 onwards, [Sebald] was a willing interviewee and, as a writer, gave over eighty interviews for television, radio, journals and newspapers in both German and English.” Torsten Hoffmann gives a fascinating report on what can be gleaned from these interviews. He finds that Sebald can be “very candid,” but could also fall into “storytelling.” In other words, read, watch, or listen to an interview with Sebald “with the same serious approach” that you would read one of his books of prose fiction.
W.G. Sebald in Context is part of Cambridge University Press’ Literature in Context series, which now numbers more than seventy volumes, offering “comprehensive information and comment to clarify and illuminate the life and work of the literary figure concerned.” I’ve already covered the section Biographical Aspects.