This course explores the writing of W. G. Sebald as a sustained inquiry into memory, history, and the ethical possibilities of narrative. Over ten weeks, students will read a selection of Sebald’s major prose works and key critical essays, treating his books not only as literary texts but also as meditations on how the twentieth century can and cannot be represented.
Through close reading, discussion, and analytical writing, the course will examine Sebald’s distinctive formal strategies—his blending of fiction and documentary, the use of photographs and archival materials, digressive structures, and long, meditative sentences—and ask how these techniques shape our understanding of trauma, exile, and loss. Attention will be given to the ways Sebald’s narrators move through landscapes and architectures that are saturated with traces of violence, from the Holocaust to colonial histories, and how these spaces become sites of haunting and remembrance.
By the end of the quarter, students …
