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Dear Don,
I don´t know if this book was already mentioned in the N-List:
"The Art of Memory in Exile, Vladimir Nabokov & Milan Kundera", by Hana
Píchová, Southern Illinois University Press,2002.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 6:45 PM
Subject: Re: CALL FOR PAPERS for Sebald Conference
Quoting "Brian Boyd (ARTS ENG)" <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>:
>
> ----------------- Message requiring your approval (86 lines)
> ------------------
> What, exactly, Don? I can't see anything. --BB
------------------------------------------------
EDREsponse,...while I wouldn't push it very far, THE EMIGRANTS' first story
draws on VN's image quite heavily--to the point of having a photo of
him. Exile
is the link. Sebald's language certainly lacks the richess of VN's.
I append a 1998posting oif mine on VN & Sebald.
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 11:19:15 -0800
From: Donald Barton Johnson <chtodel@humanitas.ucsb.edu>
Subject: VN in W.G.Sebald's THE EMMIGRANTS
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
W.G. Sebald, who is German, teaches at the University of East
Anglia. Although he has liven in England for thirty years, he writes in
German. His new novel, THE EMMIGRANTs, is now available in an English
translation by Michael Hulse [New Direction Paperback 853]. Widely praised
by the literary community, it is, as one reviewer describes it "[A] short,
chastely lyrical novel [that] is also an archive of family photos, a
documentary of German Jewish life from the late 19th Century to the late
20th, a deconstruction of fairly tales and a somber quarrel with Proust.
It is a spell-binding work of memory..." The novel takes the form of four
"biographical sketches" accompanied by the narrator's pursuit of his
subjects -- (almost) all members of his extended family.
As several reviewer remarked, Nabokov is one of the presiding
deities of the novel -- even appearing as a character. One of Sebald's
subjects, a naturalist, is described in terms of a picture of VN in
pursuit of butterflies in the Alps. The VN photo is reproduced (16). One
of the novel's other subjects meets another as he sees and comments on her
reading SPEAK, MEMORY (43). On a mountain side overlooking Montreux's
Lake Geneva, another character, Ferber, is so drawn by the landscape below
he is on the point of leaping into it when he is distracted by "a man of
about sixty...carrying a large white gauze butterfly net..." Later at a
German spa, Ferber notices two Russian gentlemen, chastising a
ten-year-old boy for distracting them from their stroll his butterfly
hunting (212),
Nabokov clearly stands as an emblem of exile, memory, and art in
Sebald's novel.
------------------------------------
The thought occurs that a book could be written the uses (e.g.
Sebald, Don Harington's EKATERINA) and abuses (e.g. A.A. Holmes & Pia
Pera) of Nabokov in literaure.
D. Barton Johnson Department of Germanic,
Slavic and Semitic Studies Phelps Hall University of California at Santa
Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106 Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825 Home Phone:
(805) 682-4618
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>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Donald B. Johnson
> Sent: Tuesday, 8 March 2005 6:32 a.m.
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS for Sebald Conference
>
> 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 à 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 University'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. Sebald'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 Sebald'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 Sebald'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, Sebald'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 Müller which is the result of that
> author's experiences with a repressive, totalitarian regime that has
> left indelible traces in her language and her perception of the
> world. By comparison, Sebald'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 Kafka's Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. While
> such metaphors of transmigration, or processes of transformation, are
> characteristic both of Sebald'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 Sebald'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.
> Sebald'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 Sebald's essayistic and fictional
> work, as well as frequent allusions to the visual arts and to
> specific painters, also attests to Sebald's crossings, or wanderings
> over, into other areas of artistic creation.
>
> 4. German Issues: Sebald and the German Past and Present
>
> While Sebald'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 Sebald'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 Nazis' policies of genocide, and it is through the Aufarb!
> eitung of their narratives that he formulates his response, as an
> expatriate German writer in England, to the horrors of his native
> country's past. Sebald'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. Sebald'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 sparke!
> d a hotly contested debate which as yet is far from resolved.
>
> 5. A Writer's Writer
>
> Sebald, who for many years was foremost a scholar and critic of
> German and, notably, Austrian literature, is very much a writer's
> writer. Perhaps the most typical of Sebald'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 narrator'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
> Sontag's critical, highly appreciative appraisal of Sebald'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 Sebald'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 Sebald'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 t!
> o 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 -----
----- End forwarded message -----