Thursday, February 5, 2015

An academic article on W. G. Sebald's untranslated academic writings

Here's a link to James R. Martin's very interesting 2013 Cambridge Literary Review article, "On Misunderstanding W. G. Sebald." Martin, who seems to have read the entire corpus of Sebald's as-yet-untranslated academic writings, argues that while the author's transformation from Frankfurt School-influenced academic to Kafka-, Nabokov-, and Bernhard-influenced writer of fiction was accompanied by an intellectual modulation in his understanding of the Shoah, there are also important continuities between the 'two Sebalds'. While I don't entirely agree with Martin's article and find his concluding paragraph a bit harsh, I highly recommend the article for the glimpses it provides of the large amount of Sebald still available only to German readers. I eagerly await the English translations of Sebald's complete critical writings, so I can attempt to judge these matters for myself. (Unfortunately, I may be waiting a very long time.)

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