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Page 1 of 3

  • Chapter 36 - Literary Prizes

  • from Part IV - Reception and Legacy
  • Edited by Uwe Schütte, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    W. G. Sebald in Context
    Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023, pp 322-330

  • Summary

    This essay analyses the reception of W.G. Sebald during his lifetime based on his track record of literary prizes awarded to him inside and outside Germany. His increasing recognition, both in Germany and in the anglophone world, is reflected in the literary prizes he received. Likewise, the literary prizes reveal significant differences in Sebald’s domestic and foreign reception, which result from the fact that in Germany his aggressive critical essays, attacking major literary figures, resulted in reservations of many juries awarding prizes and other recognitions.

  • Chapter 18 - Minor Writing

  • from Part III - Themes and Influences
  • Edited by Uwe Schütte, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    W. G. Sebald in Context
    Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023, pp 156-167

  • Summary

    This essay examines Sebald’s preference for eccentrics, amateurs and dilettantes, whose nonconformist views were incompatible with a scientific worldview or technocratic views. These were of concern to Sebald because he felt that theories and views disqualified from official discourse would offer an untapped pool of knowledge for his writing. The essay first discusses the significance and function of amateurs and dilettantes in Sebald’s narrative work as well as eccentric traits of his character. It then applies the concept of “minor writing” (Deleuze/Guattari) to Sebald’s texts and discusses the influence of academic outsiders such as Rudolf Bilz or Rupert Sheldrake. Sebald’s essays on Herbert Achternbusch and Ernst Herbeck provide examples of his use of these minor writers as inspiration for his own writing.

  • Chapter 24 - Polemics

  • from Part III - Themes and Influences
  • Edited by Uwe Schütte, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
  • Book:
    W. G. Sebald in Context
    Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023, pp 210-221

  • Summary

    This essay aims to shed light on Sebald the polemicist and provocateur, draw attention to a central component of his literary criticism that is often ignored from an anglophone perspective. The essay first deals with the two academic monographs in which Sebald violently attacks the German-Jewish writers Alfred Döblin and Carl Sternheim, disparaging them as trailblazers for the Nazis. The consistently negative academic reviews Sebald writes from 1970 onwards as a junior academic are discussed as his personal way of participating in the political upheavals of the 1960s. After the rather quiet decade of the 1980s, Sebald’s polemical impetus flares up again, parallel to his emergence as a literary author. Jurek Becker, another German-Jewish author (and Holocaust survivor) once more serves as target of his polemics. What emerges from an examination of his polemical writings are two major findings: first, Sebald tried to learn lessons from the writers he attacked, avoiding what he saw as their flaws in his own writing. Second, Sebald’s lifelong urge to polemicize was closely tied to the issue of upward social mobility, the aggression arising from feeling to be a perpetual outsider in the social environment of academia.

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