The Undiscover*d Country: W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) (Volume 90)

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 Zisselsberger is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Miami, Florida.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Fluchtträume/Traumfluchten; Journeys to the Undiscover'd Country
Die Kunst des Fliegens by W. G. Sebald
Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk
W. G. Sebald: The Anti-Tourist
"A Wrong Turn of the Wheel": Sebald's Journeys of (In)Attention
If You Come to a Spa: Displacing the Cure in Schwindel. Gefühle. and Austerlitz
Campi Deserti: Polar Landscapes and the Limits of Knowledge in Sebald and Ransmayr
"Eine Art Eingang zur Unterwelt": Katabasis in Austerlitz
Convergence Insufficiency: On Seeing Passages between W. G. Sebald and the "Travel Writer" Bruce Chatwin
Tripping: On Sebald's "Stifter"
Adventure, Imprisonment, and Melancholy: Heart of Darkness and Die Ringe des Saturn
Mapping Historical Networks in Die Ringe des Saturn
Topographical Anxiety and Dysfunctional Systems: Die Ausgewanderten and Freud's Little Hans
While the Hidden Horrors of History are Briefly Illuminated: The Poetics of Wandering in Austerlitz and Die Ringe des Saturn
Works Cited
Notes on the Contributors
Index

Markus Zisselsberger is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Miami, Florida.