Papers presented at the 2006 Sydney German Studies Symposium.

Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material / Gerhard Fischer -- Acknowledgements / Gerhard Fischer -- Editor’s Note / Gerhard Fischer -- Abbreviations/Sigla / Gerhard Fischer -- Introduction: W.G. Sebald’s Expatriate Experience and His Literary Beginnings / Gerhard Fischer -- Schreiben ex patria: W.G. Sebald und die Konstruktion einer literarischen Identität / Gerhard Fischer -- “Lines of Flight”: History and Territory in The Rings of Saturn / Judith Ryan -- W.G. Sebald: The Ambulatory Narrative and the Poetics of Digression / J.J. Long -- No Exile: Crossing the Border with Sebald and Améry / Martin Klebes -- Als Deutscher in der Fremde. Heimat, Geschichte und Natur bei W.G. Sebald / Gunther Pakendorf -- Blinder Fleck – Zur Reflexion der Gewalt der Darstellung bei W.G. Sebald / Bettina Mosbach -- Against the Integration of Atrocity into Disaster: W.G. Sebald’s Work of Memory / Karen Remmler -- History in Things – Sebald and Benjamin on Transience and Detritus / Gay Hawkins -- “The surest engagement with memory lies in its perpetual irresolution”. The Work of W.G. Sebald as Counter-Monument / Claire Feehily -- Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Great Library: A Documentary Study / James L. Cowan -- Literature and National Redemption in W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction / Peter Morgan -- Between Elias Canetti and Jacques Derrida: Satire and the Role of Fortifications in the Work of W.G. Sebald / Michael Mack -- Zweierlei Allegorie: W.G.Sebalds Austerlitz und Stephan Wackwitz’ Ein unsichtbares Land / Helmut Schmitz -- “Seemann” oder “Ackermann”? Einige Überlegungen zu Sebalds Lektüre von Walter Benjamins Essay “Der Erzähler” / Ben Hutchinson -- Auszeit des Erzählens – W.G. Sebalds Poetik der Beschreibung / Klaus R. Scherpe -- Literary Historiography: W.G. Sebald’s Fiction / Lynn Wolff -- Intermediale Identitätskonstruktion: Zu W.G. Sebalds Austerlitz / Rolf G. Renner -- Angles of Vision in Sebald’s After Nature and Unrecounted / Alan Corkhill -- Sebald’s Strange Cinematic Prose: stasis and kinesis / Deane Blackler -- Images that Remember Us: Photography and Memory in Austerlitz / George Kouvaros -- Creative Reflection: W.G. Sebald’s Critical Essays and Literary Fiction / Manfred Jurgensen -- Sebald – der unduldsame Kritiker. Zu seinen literarischen Polemiken gegen Sternheim und Andersch / Manfred Durzak -- Adler und Sebald, Lichtenstein und Grass: Vom Umgang mit Dokumentationen bei der literarischen Produktion / Hans-Christoph Graf volume Nayhauss -- Homeland and Displacement: The Status of the Text in Sebald and Proust / Richard Bales -- Gesteigerte Formen der Wahrnehmung in Schwindel. Gefühle / Maria E. Brunner -- Die Melancholie des Ortes. Stadt, Gewalt und Erinnerung / Christiane Weller -- Against “Cartesian Rigidity”: W.G. Sebald’s Reception of Borges / Gabriele Eckart -- Contributors / Gerhard Fischer.

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This volume presents the work of internationally renowned scholars from Australia, Germany, Italy, South Africa, the UK and the US. The focus on W.G. Sebald’s writing as that of an expatriate author offers a fresh and productive approach to Sebald scholarship. In one way or another, all 28 essays in this innovative, bi-lingual collection take up the notion of Sebald’s experience as an expatriate writer: be it in the analysis of intertextual, transmedial and generic border crossings, on the “exposure to the other” and the experience of alterity, on the question of identity construction and performance, on affinities with other expatriate writers, on the recurring topics of “home”, “exile”, “dislocation” and “migration”, or on the continuing work of “memory” to work through and to preserve the consciousness of a destructive past that has informed the childhood as much as the adult life-world of the author.

English and German.