Deadline EXTENDED: Friday, April 26, 2024

Conference Date: Saturday, May 18, 2024 

Format: Online (via Zoom)

Abstract: 200-250 words + short biographical statement + time zone

Submit to: wgsebald80conference@gmail.com

This conference invites graduate students and beyond, including lecturers and independent scholars, to join in a critical celebration of the works of the unique Anglo-German author W. G. Sebald (1944-2001). Hailed by legendary critic Susan Sontag in a 2000 essay published in Times Literary Supplement, she asked whether “literary greatness [was] still possible” and concluded “one of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.” Several journal articles, monographs, and other collections have been published about this eccentric author (see the bibliography below), and yet, he remains largely unknown to Western audiences. This conference hopes to bring scholars out of the woodworks and contribute their thoughts and ideas about Sebald and any of his various works, including his essays, i.e., On the Natural History of Destruction, and literary prose, i.e., After Nature, Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz. 

There is no one guiding theme under which to produce critical evaluations of Sebald’s texts. Instead, given the eclecticism of Sebald’s subject matter, diverse approaches are encouraged, including, but not limited to:

Postcoloniality

Orientalism 

Gender and Sexuality

Bio- and necropolitics

Trauma

Archive 

Gothic 

Ecocriticism

Spatiality 

Temporality 

Narratology

Genre 

Animal Studies

Historiography 

Religion 

Rhetoric

Thing Theory

Photography

Frankfurt School

Psychoanalysis

Thanatourism

Translation

Please submit a 200-250 word abstract, along with a brief biographical statement and your time zone in order to best approximate appropriate times for presentations, to wgsebald80conference@gmail.com. Full papers should aim to be 10-15 minutes in length. The conference will be held online over Zoom at no charge and, depending on the amount of submissions, may roll over into two days - for now, it is tentatively scheduled on what would have been the author’s 80th birthday (May 18, 1944). (Zoom link will be sent out a week before the conference).

Also, select papers will be solicited to be compiled in an edited collection on the works of W. G. Sebald. Details to come. 

Bibliography

Angier, Carole. Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald. Bloomsbury Circus, 2021. 

Burns, Rob, and Wilfried van der Will. “The calamitous perspective of modernity: Sebald’s negative ontology.” Journal of European Studies, vol. 41, no. ¾, 2011, pp. 341-358. DOI: 10.1177/0047244111413700

Fischer, Gerhard, editor. W.G. Sebald: Schreiben ex patria/ Expatriate Writing. Rodopi, 2009.

Groves, Jason. “Writing after Nature: A Sebaldian Ecopoetics.” German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, edited by Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 267-292.

Johannsen, Anja K. “‘The contrarieties that are our yearnings’: Allegorical, nostalgic and transcendent spaces in the work of W. G. Sebald.” Journal of European Studies, vol. 41, no. ¾, 2011, pp. 377-393. DOI: 10.1177/0047244111413704

Kilbourn, Russell. W. G. Sebald's Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe With Spectator. Northwestern University Press, 2018.

Long, J. J., and Anne Fuchs, editors. W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History. Königshausen & Neumann, 2007.

Long, J. J., and Anne Whitehead, editors. W. G. Sebald - A Critical Companion. U of Washington P, 2004.

McCulloh, Mark Richard. Understanding W. G. Sebald. University of South Carolina Press, 2003.

McCulloch, Mark, and Scott Denham, editors. W. G. Sebald: History - Memory - Trauma. De Gruyter, Inc., 2006.

Schwarz, Lyn Sharon, editor. the emergence of memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald. Seven Stories Press, 2007.

Silverblatt, Michael. “A Poem of an Invisible Subject.” the emergence of memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, edited by Lyn Sharon Schwarz, Seven Stories Press, 2007, pp. 76-86. 

Wolff, Lynn L. W. G. Sebald’s Hybrid Poetics: Literature as Historiography. De Gruyter, 2014. 

Zisselsberger, Markus, editor. The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the poetics of travel. Camden House, 2010.