W.G. Sebald. Die dialektische Imagination

This book uses the annotations in W.G. Sebald’s private library (held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach) to develop an interpretation of his prose style as fundamentally dialectical. Alongside his readings of writers as diverse as Benjamin, Bernhard, Bassani, and Lévi-Strauss, it uses in particular Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment to help develop a close reading of Sebald’s syntax and narrative structures. The key concern of Sebald’s prose emerges not as the Holocaust (as has often been contended), but rather the dialectical processes of ‘progress’ and ‘regression’ inherent in history.