Atrocity and Agency: W.G. Sebald’s Traumatic Memory in the Light of Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Tragedy

Research output: Contribution to book or proceedingChapter

Abstract

Relatively late in his career W. G. Sebald began attracting wide attention for his semi-autobiographical books written in a dense and digressive style and incorporating black-and-white photographs and postcard images. These images intimate some of the more profound costs of nineteenth-and twentieth-century European civilization. Evoking the aftermath of wars, genocides, and environmental devastation in such books as Vertigo , The Rings of Saturn , and The Emigrants , Sebald has attracted a growing body of scholarly criticism that tends increasingly to examine his literary engagement with traces of past suffering under the rubric of trauma.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationTragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art and Thought
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 1 2014

Disciplines

  • Political Science

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