Subject
CALL FOR PAPERS for Sebald Conference
From
Date
Body
EDNOTE. SEBALD is a writer who owes much to VN
----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 00:19:00 -0500
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: as different as Nabokov and Casanova -- CALL FOR PAPERS ...
To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
[1] http://www.fabula.org/actualites/article10603.php[2] WG Sebald
and Expatriate Writing
Fabula, France - 14 hours ago
... Other writers, as different as NABOKOV and Casanova, frequently
make appearances in his work, as fictional or “real”, historical
personae, or in the form ... [3]
Appel Ă contribution
Date limite : septembre 2005
W. G. Sebald and Expatriate Writing
Information publiée le dimanche 6 mars 2005 par Marielle Macé[4]
(source : Gerhard Fischer[5])
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Sydney German Studies Symposium 2006
on
W. G. Sebald and Expatriate Writing
Goethe-Institut, Sydney, Australia
20 – 23 July 2006
The work of W.G. Sebald will be the focus of an international
scholarly forum, the 8th Sydney German Studies Symposium, which will
take place at the Goethe-Institute in Sydney, Australia, from 20 – 23
July 2006. The conference is being held under the auspices of the
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of New South
Wales, and is organised by the UniversityÂ’s Department of German
Studies. Offers of contributions to the conference, in the form of
individual papers or panels/clusters, are invited along the lines of
discussion outlined in the following paragraphs.
1. On W. G. Sebald (1944 – 2001)
Five years after the untimely death of Max Sebald, as he preferred to
be called by his friends and colleagues, the Sydney Symposium will
present an opportunity for a critical and scholarly assessment of the
Gesamtwerk of an author whose highly personal, idiosyncratic writing
has received international recognition in a comparatively short span
of time. SebaldÂ’s work is not easily categorised; it meanders and
scintillates between fiction and (auto)biography, essay and
travelogue, with frequent excursions into art history, literary and
cultural criticism, and historical scholarship.
2. Sebald and Expatriate Writing
The notion of expatriate writing could offer a useful point of
departure to describe and to analyse the specificities of SebaldÂ’s
innovative literary creation. The experience of authors living and
writing abroad is common enough in recent cultural history - compare
for instance the group of “modernist” American writers in Paris of
the 1930s or, in the context of postcolonial literature, the
internationally recognised authors from India (and other Commonwealth
countries) living and working today in the U.K., Canada or the U.S.
However, the expatriate writer is comparatively rare in German
literature. The lack of an adequate term in German for the English
expatriate already points to a special case. Its closest
approximation, vaterlandslos, characteristically conjures up
associations with a stereotype of German history characterised by
pre-modern, authoritarian and illiberal tendencies. To be sure, exile
and emigration, mostly for political reasons, constitute an important
part of the life experiences of German intellectuals in the 20th
century, and much of German literature of that period, as well as of
others, is Exilliteratur. Some of the most important and innovative
among the literary exiles might be also be called expatriates - e.g.
Elias Canetti, Jean Amery or Paul Celan. It is also true that over
the last few decades the Federal Republic has become a significant
place for expatriate writing, i.e. the so-called Migrantenliteratur
produced by “foreigners” (Ausländer) living in Germany and writing in
German. While there are similarities with such writers which are worth
exploring, Sebald’s case fits – strictly speaking – none of the above
categories.
Born in 1944 in Bavaria, Sebald studied in Germany before living in
Switzerland and in the U.K., settling, finally, in Norwich in 1970
where he lived for the rest of his life. As an immigrant, memories of
his postwar German childhood and youth inform SebaldÂ’s writing as much
as the conscious attempt of the adult to explore the fabric of social
and cultural life of his adopted new country. This is a two-fold
process: to come to terms with the legacy of his German history,
albeit from a distance, and to appropriate for himself the political,
socio-economic and ecological history of the East Coast of England
where he made his home. Not surprisingly, the issue of identity,
questions of identity formation and aspects of identity performance,
play an important part in his work. Similarly, the use of (mostly)
literary role models allows for freqent self-reflective insights into
his own practice as a contemporary expatriate writer.
Like many expatriates, SebaldÂ’s first person narrators seem to feel
rather ill at ease in their old country while not entirely
comfortable in the new one. Yet again, his narrative perspective is
substantially different from that of other writers who became
expatriates without having a choice. It is quite unlike, for example,
the fremder Blick of Herta MĂĽller which is the result of that authorÂ’s
experiences with a repressive, totalitarian regime that has left
indelible traces in her language and her perception of the world. By
comparison, SebaldÂ’s situation as a writer and academic is a fairly
privileged one. He was neither an economic migrant nor a political
refuge; his exile from Germany, if that is a correct designation, was
voluntary, and it did not prevent him travelling frequently back and
forth across the Channel. It seems that he gladly accepted the one
luxury available to him, a certain amount of free and unstructured
time. But he was not a jet-setting academic; his favourite mode of
travel was by train, by bus and on foot. Thus, on the one hand,
Sebald is not unlike the postmodern, uprooted expatriate in the age
of global exchange and communication; but his work is, on the other
hand, very much committed to the exploration and the preservation of
a cultural sphere which is distinctively the “old” Europe. The
contemporary presence of what is left of this Europe and its special
quality as an historical, literary and cultural artefact, is being
traced by Sebald in much of his work, sometimes in a seemingly
anachronistic and even nostalgic mode, but always as a vital effort
to preserve a precious and, in view of current developments towards a
homogenizing global market, a potentially emancipatory cultural memory
that resists the pull of a single, hegemonic world culture.
3. A Literature of Transmigration
At the end of the opening chapter of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald uses
the term “transmigration” to refer to the silkworm’s change from moth
to caterpillar, a motif taken up and expanded in the final chapter
where the author presents a veritable short history of the silk
industry, across millenia and continents. Earlier in the first
chapter, the first-person narrator, undoubtedly Sebald, compares
himself to Franz KafkaÂ’s Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. While
such metaphors of transmigration, or processes of transformation, are
characteristic both of SebaldÂ’s literary technique of associative and
thematic linkages, as well as of his often stylized self-references,
the notion of transmigration describes his work on an even more
elementary level. Both SebaldÂ’s narrators and his fictional heroes
are constantly on the move. Just like their author, who seems most at
home and at peace with himself when he durchwandert (transmigrates)
the countrysides of Switzerland or Italy, for example, his literary
characters are migrants who cannot rest. SebaldÂ’s work amounts to a
transmigration of European landscapes, of geographical as well as
historical and cultural spaces, across borders and time zones. It is
also transmigratory in the sense that it crosses literary genres;
like many travel writers. e.g. Bruce Chatwin whose name is often
evoked as a kindred spirit, he moves effortlessly between documentary
or autobiography and belles lettres, and he does so always in his very
own, lyrically inspired and elegant prose. The use of photography in
SebaldÂ’s essayistic and fictional work, as well as frequent allusions
to the visual arts and to specific painters, also attests to SebaldÂ’s
crossings, or wanderings over, into other areas of artistic creation.
4. German Issues: Sebald and the German Past and Present
While SebaldÂ’s literary world is clearly shaped by a European
sensitivity and while he is very much an international writer, his
work is nevertheless characterised by a strong presence of “German
issues”. Sebald’s visits to scenes of his Bavarian childhood, his
attempts to find traces of the history of his village and its
regional surroundings, his reconstruction of family trees and local
histories, all of these relate to an ongoing exploration of a lost
and irretrievable sense of Heimat. Similarly, the central concern of
postwar German intellectual history, the coming to terms with the
legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust, serves as an important
motivational impetus in SebaldÂ’s work. Characteristically, it is
again his perspective as an expatriate writer which accounts for his
own, unique approach to the experience of the Holocaust: as a student
and, later, as a lecturer in England he meets the surviving victims of
the NazisÂ’ policies of genocide, and it is through the Aufarbeitung of
their narratives that he formulates his response, as an expatriate
German writer in England, to the horrors of his native countryÂ’s
past. SebaldÂ’s double perspective, that of the child who remembers
growing up in view of the rubble of the destroyed cities in the
vicinity of his rural home in the Allgäu, and that of the adult
living in the English countryside not far from the place from where
the Allied bombers started on their missions of mass destruction and
burning, is again a key factor in his interest in the literary
aftermath of the war in Germany. In his controversial essay,
Luftkrieg und Literatur, he claimed that his German colleagues, by
and large, failed “morally” in their duty to adequately document the
horrific experiences of ordinary German civilians during the bombing
raids. SebaldÂ’s thesis was received with a great deal of criticism,
but also with considerable amount of support, by historians and
literary scholars and authors alike. The essay sparked a hotly
contested debate which as yet is far from resolved.
5. A WriterÂ’s Writer
Sebald, who for many years was foremost a scholar and critic of
German and, notably, Austrian literature, is very much a writerÂ’s
writer. Perhaps the most typical of SebaldÂ’s narrative position is
that of a writer/narrator who finds himself re-tracing the journeys
of other writers in the past, like Stendhal, Kafka or Conrad, to
discover that their paths and that of the narratorÂ’s life itinerary
have crossed and are linked in a myriad of mysterious ways,
contingent or otherwise. Other writers, as different as Nabokov and
Casanova, frequently make appearances in his work, as fictional or
“real”, historical personae, or in the form of intertextual
references. Many contemporary colleagues of Sebald have found his
peculiar style stimulating, the subject matters he deals with
attractive and challenging. To give only three examples: In Germany,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger included an obituary poem about Sebald in
his latest collection of poetry; earlier he had “discovered” Sebald
for the German literary market by publishing his first works in the
famous Andere Bibliothek. In the United States, the late Susan
SontagÂ’s critical, highly appreciative appraisal of SebaldÂ’s work
contributed a great deal to cementing his reputation among writers in
the English-speaking world. And in Australia, where he now resides,
J.M. Coetzee found elequent words of praise for what he called
Sebald’s literary “genius”. In Australia, in particular, a number of
authors have been fascinated by SebaldÂ’s work to which they feel a
strong affinity. Thus, one of the aims of the Sydney Symposium will
be to present a round-table or panel discussion of Australian authors
who will speak about their views on, and their responses to SebaldÂ’s
writing. This public forum, intended as part of the larger academic
conference, will also provide an opportunity for Australian writers
to meet interested literary scholars from overseas (primarily Europe
and the U.S.), to discuss their own work and to exchange ideas and
opinions on matters of mutual interest.
Call for Papers
Enquiries, expressions of interest and proposals for papers in
English or German are invited. Offers of contributions that address
the questions and topics outlined above are particularly welcome. It
is planned that the question of expatriate German writing will be at
the centre of the conference; however, papers dealing with other
aspects of the work of Sebald will be considered. Offers should
include a title and a one-page abstract.
The conference language will be English. All presentations are to be
not more than 45 minutes in length (30 minutes paper, 15 minutes
discussion time).
Please direct all correspondence to the conference convenor:
A/Prof. Gerhard Fischer
German Studies, UNSW
Sydney 2052 Australia
Phone 61 2 9385 2327
E-mail: G.Fischer@unsw.edu.au[6]
Links:
------
[1] http://www.fabula.org/
[2] http://www.fabula.org/actualites/article10603.php
[3] http://www.fabula.org/apropos.php
[4] mailto:mace@fabula.org
[5] mailto:G.Fischer@unsw.edu.au
[6] mailto:G.Fischer@unsw.edu.au
----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 00:19:00 -0500
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: as different as Nabokov and Casanova -- CALL FOR PAPERS ...
To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
[1] http://www.fabula.org/actualites/article10603.php[2] WG Sebald
and Expatriate Writing
Fabula, France - 14 hours ago
... Other writers, as different as NABOKOV and Casanova, frequently
make appearances in his work, as fictional or “real”, historical
personae, or in the form ... [3]
Appel Ă contribution
Date limite : septembre 2005
W. G. Sebald and Expatriate Writing
Information publiée le dimanche 6 mars 2005 par Marielle Macé[4]
(source : Gerhard Fischer[5])
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Sydney German Studies Symposium 2006
on
W. G. Sebald and Expatriate Writing
Goethe-Institut, Sydney, Australia
20 – 23 July 2006
The work of W.G. Sebald will be the focus of an international
scholarly forum, the 8th Sydney German Studies Symposium, which will
take place at the Goethe-Institute in Sydney, Australia, from 20 – 23
July 2006. The conference is being held under the auspices of the
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of New South
Wales, and is organised by the UniversityÂ’s Department of German
Studies. Offers of contributions to the conference, in the form of
individual papers or panels/clusters, are invited along the lines of
discussion outlined in the following paragraphs.
1. On W. G. Sebald (1944 – 2001)
Five years after the untimely death of Max Sebald, as he preferred to
be called by his friends and colleagues, the Sydney Symposium will
present an opportunity for a critical and scholarly assessment of the
Gesamtwerk of an author whose highly personal, idiosyncratic writing
has received international recognition in a comparatively short span
of time. SebaldÂ’s work is not easily categorised; it meanders and
scintillates between fiction and (auto)biography, essay and
travelogue, with frequent excursions into art history, literary and
cultural criticism, and historical scholarship.
2. Sebald and Expatriate Writing
The notion of expatriate writing could offer a useful point of
departure to describe and to analyse the specificities of SebaldÂ’s
innovative literary creation. The experience of authors living and
writing abroad is common enough in recent cultural history - compare
for instance the group of “modernist” American writers in Paris of
the 1930s or, in the context of postcolonial literature, the
internationally recognised authors from India (and other Commonwealth
countries) living and working today in the U.K., Canada or the U.S.
However, the expatriate writer is comparatively rare in German
literature. The lack of an adequate term in German for the English
expatriate already points to a special case. Its closest
approximation, vaterlandslos, characteristically conjures up
associations with a stereotype of German history characterised by
pre-modern, authoritarian and illiberal tendencies. To be sure, exile
and emigration, mostly for political reasons, constitute an important
part of the life experiences of German intellectuals in the 20th
century, and much of German literature of that period, as well as of
others, is Exilliteratur. Some of the most important and innovative
among the literary exiles might be also be called expatriates - e.g.
Elias Canetti, Jean Amery or Paul Celan. It is also true that over
the last few decades the Federal Republic has become a significant
place for expatriate writing, i.e. the so-called Migrantenliteratur
produced by “foreigners” (Ausländer) living in Germany and writing in
German. While there are similarities with such writers which are worth
exploring, Sebald’s case fits – strictly speaking – none of the above
categories.
Born in 1944 in Bavaria, Sebald studied in Germany before living in
Switzerland and in the U.K., settling, finally, in Norwich in 1970
where he lived for the rest of his life. As an immigrant, memories of
his postwar German childhood and youth inform SebaldÂ’s writing as much
as the conscious attempt of the adult to explore the fabric of social
and cultural life of his adopted new country. This is a two-fold
process: to come to terms with the legacy of his German history,
albeit from a distance, and to appropriate for himself the political,
socio-economic and ecological history of the East Coast of England
where he made his home. Not surprisingly, the issue of identity,
questions of identity formation and aspects of identity performance,
play an important part in his work. Similarly, the use of (mostly)
literary role models allows for freqent self-reflective insights into
his own practice as a contemporary expatriate writer.
Like many expatriates, SebaldÂ’s first person narrators seem to feel
rather ill at ease in their old country while not entirely
comfortable in the new one. Yet again, his narrative perspective is
substantially different from that of other writers who became
expatriates without having a choice. It is quite unlike, for example,
the fremder Blick of Herta MĂĽller which is the result of that authorÂ’s
experiences with a repressive, totalitarian regime that has left
indelible traces in her language and her perception of the world. By
comparison, SebaldÂ’s situation as a writer and academic is a fairly
privileged one. He was neither an economic migrant nor a political
refuge; his exile from Germany, if that is a correct designation, was
voluntary, and it did not prevent him travelling frequently back and
forth across the Channel. It seems that he gladly accepted the one
luxury available to him, a certain amount of free and unstructured
time. But he was not a jet-setting academic; his favourite mode of
travel was by train, by bus and on foot. Thus, on the one hand,
Sebald is not unlike the postmodern, uprooted expatriate in the age
of global exchange and communication; but his work is, on the other
hand, very much committed to the exploration and the preservation of
a cultural sphere which is distinctively the “old” Europe. The
contemporary presence of what is left of this Europe and its special
quality as an historical, literary and cultural artefact, is being
traced by Sebald in much of his work, sometimes in a seemingly
anachronistic and even nostalgic mode, but always as a vital effort
to preserve a precious and, in view of current developments towards a
homogenizing global market, a potentially emancipatory cultural memory
that resists the pull of a single, hegemonic world culture.
3. A Literature of Transmigration
At the end of the opening chapter of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald uses
the term “transmigration” to refer to the silkworm’s change from moth
to caterpillar, a motif taken up and expanded in the final chapter
where the author presents a veritable short history of the silk
industry, across millenia and continents. Earlier in the first
chapter, the first-person narrator, undoubtedly Sebald, compares
himself to Franz KafkaÂ’s Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. While
such metaphors of transmigration, or processes of transformation, are
characteristic both of SebaldÂ’s literary technique of associative and
thematic linkages, as well as of his often stylized self-references,
the notion of transmigration describes his work on an even more
elementary level. Both SebaldÂ’s narrators and his fictional heroes
are constantly on the move. Just like their author, who seems most at
home and at peace with himself when he durchwandert (transmigrates)
the countrysides of Switzerland or Italy, for example, his literary
characters are migrants who cannot rest. SebaldÂ’s work amounts to a
transmigration of European landscapes, of geographical as well as
historical and cultural spaces, across borders and time zones. It is
also transmigratory in the sense that it crosses literary genres;
like many travel writers. e.g. Bruce Chatwin whose name is often
evoked as a kindred spirit, he moves effortlessly between documentary
or autobiography and belles lettres, and he does so always in his very
own, lyrically inspired and elegant prose. The use of photography in
SebaldÂ’s essayistic and fictional work, as well as frequent allusions
to the visual arts and to specific painters, also attests to SebaldÂ’s
crossings, or wanderings over, into other areas of artistic creation.
4. German Issues: Sebald and the German Past and Present
While SebaldÂ’s literary world is clearly shaped by a European
sensitivity and while he is very much an international writer, his
work is nevertheless characterised by a strong presence of “German
issues”. Sebald’s visits to scenes of his Bavarian childhood, his
attempts to find traces of the history of his village and its
regional surroundings, his reconstruction of family trees and local
histories, all of these relate to an ongoing exploration of a lost
and irretrievable sense of Heimat. Similarly, the central concern of
postwar German intellectual history, the coming to terms with the
legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust, serves as an important
motivational impetus in SebaldÂ’s work. Characteristically, it is
again his perspective as an expatriate writer which accounts for his
own, unique approach to the experience of the Holocaust: as a student
and, later, as a lecturer in England he meets the surviving victims of
the NazisÂ’ policies of genocide, and it is through the Aufarbeitung of
their narratives that he formulates his response, as an expatriate
German writer in England, to the horrors of his native countryÂ’s
past. SebaldÂ’s double perspective, that of the child who remembers
growing up in view of the rubble of the destroyed cities in the
vicinity of his rural home in the Allgäu, and that of the adult
living in the English countryside not far from the place from where
the Allied bombers started on their missions of mass destruction and
burning, is again a key factor in his interest in the literary
aftermath of the war in Germany. In his controversial essay,
Luftkrieg und Literatur, he claimed that his German colleagues, by
and large, failed “morally” in their duty to adequately document the
horrific experiences of ordinary German civilians during the bombing
raids. SebaldÂ’s thesis was received with a great deal of criticism,
but also with considerable amount of support, by historians and
literary scholars and authors alike. The essay sparked a hotly
contested debate which as yet is far from resolved.
5. A WriterÂ’s Writer
Sebald, who for many years was foremost a scholar and critic of
German and, notably, Austrian literature, is very much a writerÂ’s
writer. Perhaps the most typical of SebaldÂ’s narrative position is
that of a writer/narrator who finds himself re-tracing the journeys
of other writers in the past, like Stendhal, Kafka or Conrad, to
discover that their paths and that of the narratorÂ’s life itinerary
have crossed and are linked in a myriad of mysterious ways,
contingent or otherwise. Other writers, as different as Nabokov and
Casanova, frequently make appearances in his work, as fictional or
“real”, historical personae, or in the form of intertextual
references. Many contemporary colleagues of Sebald have found his
peculiar style stimulating, the subject matters he deals with
attractive and challenging. To give only three examples: In Germany,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger included an obituary poem about Sebald in
his latest collection of poetry; earlier he had “discovered” Sebald
for the German literary market by publishing his first works in the
famous Andere Bibliothek. In the United States, the late Susan
SontagÂ’s critical, highly appreciative appraisal of SebaldÂ’s work
contributed a great deal to cementing his reputation among writers in
the English-speaking world. And in Australia, where he now resides,
J.M. Coetzee found elequent words of praise for what he called
Sebald’s literary “genius”. In Australia, in particular, a number of
authors have been fascinated by SebaldÂ’s work to which they feel a
strong affinity. Thus, one of the aims of the Sydney Symposium will
be to present a round-table or panel discussion of Australian authors
who will speak about their views on, and their responses to SebaldÂ’s
writing. This public forum, intended as part of the larger academic
conference, will also provide an opportunity for Australian writers
to meet interested literary scholars from overseas (primarily Europe
and the U.S.), to discuss their own work and to exchange ideas and
opinions on matters of mutual interest.
Call for Papers
Enquiries, expressions of interest and proposals for papers in
English or German are invited. Offers of contributions that address
the questions and topics outlined above are particularly welcome. It
is planned that the question of expatriate German writing will be at
the centre of the conference; however, papers dealing with other
aspects of the work of Sebald will be considered. Offers should
include a title and a one-page abstract.
The conference language will be English. All presentations are to be
not more than 45 minutes in length (30 minutes paper, 15 minutes
discussion time).
Please direct all correspondence to the conference convenor:
A/Prof. Gerhard Fischer
German Studies, UNSW
Sydney 2052 Australia
Phone 61 2 9385 2327
E-mail: G.Fischer@unsw.edu.au[6]
Links:
------
[1] http://www.fabula.org/
[2] http://www.fabula.org/actualites/article10603.php
[3] http://www.fabula.org/apropos.php
[4] mailto:mace@fabula.org
[5] mailto:G.Fischer@unsw.edu.au
[6] mailto:G.Fischer@unsw.edu.au
----- End forwarded message -----