The first sustained interrogation of travel in Sebald's literary and
essayistic work, employing multivalent and new critical perspectives.
W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) is the most prominent and perhaps the most
enigmatic German-language writer of recent decades. His books have had a
more profound impact outside the German-speaking world than those of any
other. His innovative approach to writing brings to the fore concerns
that are central to contemporary culture: the relationship between
memory, history, and trauma; the experience of exile and our relation to
place; and the role of literature (and photography) in the remembrance
of the past. This collection of essays places travel at the center of
Sebald's poetics and shows how his appropriation of travel in its myriad
historical and cultural forms -- tourism, the pilgrimage, the walking
vacation, travel as escape -- works to craft intertextual narratives in
which the pursuit of individual life stories is mapped onto a wider
European cultural history of loss and destruction. Following these cues,
the contributors wander the various modalities of travel in Sebald's
writing in order to discover how walking, flying, sojourning, and other
kinds of peregrination inform the relationship between writing, reading,
memory, and place in Sebald's work. At the same time, the essays uncover
in innovative ways the affinities between Sebald and literary travelers
like Bruce Chatwin, Franz Kafka, Adalbert Stifter, Christoph Ransmayr,
and Joseph Conrad.
Contributors: Christian Moser, J. J. Long, Carolin Duttlinger, Martin
Klebes, Alan Itkin, James Martin, Brad Prager, Neil Christian Pages,
Margaret Bruzelius, Barbara Hui, Dora Osborne, Peter Arnds.
Markus Zisselsbergeris Assistant Professor of German at the University
of Miami, Florida.
