Searching for Sebald

One of the nice things about having this blog is that I get to see what you buy through my Amazon links. (Don’t worry, it’s all completely anonymous.)

And sometimes you buy quite interesting things indeed.

Product Description
W.G. Sebald’s books are sui generis hybrids of fiction, travelogue, autobiography and historical expos , in which a narrator (both Sebald and not Sebald) comments on the quick blossoming of natural wonders and the long deaths that come of human atrocities. All his narratives are punctuated with images–murky photographs, architectural plans, engravings, paintings, newspaper clippings–inserted into the prose without captions and often without obvious connection to the words that surround them. This important volume includes a rare 1993 interview called "’But the written word is not a true document’: A Conversation with W.G. Sebald about Photography and Literature," in which Sebald talks exclusively about his use of photographs. It contains some of Sebald’s most illuminating and poetic remarks about the topic yet. In it, he discusses Barthes, the photograph’s "appeal," the childhood image of Kafka, family photographs, and even images he never used in his writings. In addition, Searching for Sebald positions Sebald within an art-historical tradition that begins with the Surrealists, continues through Joseph Beuys and blossoms in the recent work of Christian Boltanski and Gerhard Richter, and tracks his continuing inspiration to artists such as Tacita Dean and Helen Mirra. An international roster of artists and scholars unpacks the intricacies of his unique method. Seventeen theoretical essays approach Sebald through the multiple filters of art history (Krauss), film studies (Kluge), cultural theory (Benjamin), psychoanalysis (Freud), and especially photographic history and theory (Barthes, Kracauer), and 17 modern and contemporary art projects are read through a Sebaldian filter. If Sebald’s artistic output acts as a touchstone for new critical theory being written on "post-medium" photographic practices, Seaching for Sebald suggests a model for new investigations in the burgeoning field of visual studies.

This book is 600 pages, by the way. Aside from this, I know of:

• J.J. Long’s book on Sebald (see my discussion of here)
• W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (edited by Long)
• and the somewhat recent collection of Sebald interviews

I’ll toss it out to the group: What else out there among the growing body of Sebald criticism is worth reading?

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More from Conversational Reading:

1. How Sebald Explains Modernity: J.J. Long’s W.G. Sebald In the introduction to his book on Sebald, W.G. Sebald, J.J. Long rather amorphously states that his intention is to discuss how Sebald’s works deal...
2. Sebald in Harper’s Harpers has a lengthy essay on Sebald in the April issue, but if you want to read, you gotta pay. It’s discussing this new book...
3. Friday Column: W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction When published in English in 2003, W.G. Sebald’s collection of lectures, On the Natural History of Destruction, touched off a storm of critical response....
4. Sebald Influence; Highly Rec’d Book This fall NYRB is publishing a book titled Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter, and it seems to come well-recommended. NYRB reminds me that Gabriel Josipovici...
5. Sebald Dead but blurbing. Perhaps there’s money to be made for universities that want to license out caches of letters and assorted private documents to praise-hungry...

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