Ghostwriting: W. G. Sebald’s Poetics of History
Nov 2017 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Ebook
336
Pages
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About this ebook
Ghostwriting provides the first comprehensive analysis of the fictional prose narratives of one of contemporary Germany's most recognized authors, the émigré writer W. G. Sebald. Examining Sebald's well-known published texts in the context of largely unknown unpublished works, and informed by documents and information from Sebald's literary estate, this book offers a detailed portrait of his characteristic literary techniques and how they emerged and matured out of the practices and attitudes he represented in his profession as a literary scholar.
The title “Ghostwriting” signals the convergence in Sebald's works of a set of diverse historical questions, philosophical views, and literary practices. Many historical ghosts haunt Sebald's narratives on the level of story. Moreover, Sebald's narrator plays the role of a ghostwriter in the profound sense that his stories fictionally re-enact the histories of obscure, but once-living individuals whose lives they revitalize, and whose fates are tied up with the most virulent historical conjunctures of the modern world. This study thus seeks to comprehend the constitutive elements of Sebald's “poetics of history,” his implementation of literary tools for effective historical memorializing.
The title “Ghostwriting” signals the convergence in Sebald's works of a set of diverse historical questions, philosophical views, and literary practices. Many historical ghosts haunt Sebald's narratives on the level of story. Moreover, Sebald's narrator plays the role of a ghostwriter in the profound sense that his stories fictionally re-enact the histories of obscure, but once-living individuals whose lives they revitalize, and whose fates are tied up with the most virulent historical conjunctures of the modern world. This study thus seeks to comprehend the constitutive elements of Sebald's “poetics of history,” his implementation of literary tools for effective historical memorializing.
About the author
Richard T. Gray is the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities and Professor of German and European Studies at the University of Washington, USA. He is the author of five books, including Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770-1850 (2008), A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia (with Ruth V. Gross, Rolf Goebel, and Clayton Koelb; 2005), About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (2004), and Stations of the Divided Subject: Contestation and Ideological Legitimation in German Bourgeois Literature, 1770-1912 (1995). He is the editor and/or translator of 11 books, including Volumes 2 and 11 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche in 20 Volumes and Approaches to Teaching Kafka's Short Fiction (1995). He is Editor-at-large of Journal of the Kafka Society of America and General Editor of book series Literary Conjugations.
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