Ghostwriting W. G. Sebald’s Poetics of History

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 Examining Sebald's well-known published texts in the context of largely unknown unpublished works, and informed by documents and information from Sebald's literary estate, this book offers a detailed portrait of his characteristic literary techniques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.

List of Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Sebald's Literary Séance
1. Wittgenstein's Ghost: Toward Understanding Sebald's Literary Turn
2. The Birth of the Prose Fictionalizer from the Spirit of Biographical Criticism: Schwindel. Gefühle
3. Sebald's Literary Refinement: “Dr. Henry Selwyn” and Its Textual Predecessor
4. Neither Here Nor There: Exile as Dis-Placement in “Dr. Henry Selwyn”
5. Sebald's Ectopia: Homelessness and Alienated Heritage in “Max Aurach”/“Max Ferber”
6. Fabulation and Metahistory: W. G. Sebald and the Problematic of Contemporary (German) Holocaust Fiction
7. Sebald's Segues: Performing Narrative Contingency in Die Ringe des Saturn
8. Writing at the Roche Limit: Order and Entropy in Die Ringe des Saturn
9. Narrating Environmental Catastrophe: Ecopsychology and Ecological Apocalypse in Sebald's Corsica Project

Bibliography
Index

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