Professor Carol Jacobs’s talk: “W. G. Sebald’s Art of Citation”
26 May 2015 - 16:00 / 26 May 2015 - 18:00
Northrop Frye Hall, Room 113
Victoria University
Toronto
Writing in 2000 Susan Sontag had this to say of the contemporary literary scene: “Is literary greatness still possible? . . . One of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.” The awe that Sebald’s writing inspires is partly due to his noted ethical stance , the experimental daring of his stylistic innovations, and the puzzling use of visual materials in his prose fiction. Nowhere in his work is there a more compelling meditation on realism and fiction than a little essay entitled “Like Day and Night: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp.” This lecture will explore the ins and outs of a text which is, perhaps, both the most serious and also wittiest of Sebald’s theoretical reflections.
Carol Jacobs is Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of German Literature at Yale University. Her books include Uncontainable Romanticism (on Shelley, Emily Brontë, and Kleist), Telling Time, In the Language of Walter Benjamin, and Skirting the Ethical, a meditation on the relationship between language and ethics in texts from classical Greek to contemporary cinema. Her forthcoming book, Sebald’s Vision, will appear this fall with Columbia University Press.
