Sebald's Bachelors - Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life

摘要

W.G. Sebald (1944-2001), novelist, poet, literary scholar and for nearly 30years academic in German Studies at the University of East Anglia, is undoubtedly one of the major figures in recent European literature. Nonetheless scholarly interest in his work is a little uneven, being more concentrated in the English-speaking countries than Germany itself. He certainly has been the subject of more critical attention in the UK than any other contemporary German writer, some of it written by former colleagues, such as Richard Sheppard, Jo Catling and Arthur Williams, and some by former students, such as Uwe Schuette and Greg Bond. It is remarkable, too, how many rising figures in British German Studies have made significant contributions. There are books by Anna Fuchs, Ben Hutchinson and Jonathan Long, and shorter pieces by Mary Cosgrove, Carolin Duttlinger and Stuart Taberner. Canonisation, however, surely came from the USA when Eric Santner bracketed him with two undisputed greats of international modernism in On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago, 2006). No other German novelist from the second half of the twentieth century keeps such critical company. There is evidence, too, that at the time of his death, Sebald's fiction was more appreciated by British readers in translation than it was in the original by readers of German. As he lived and worked in England for 35 years, this need not be too surprising. His principal settings are after all British. Places like Dunwich on the Suffolk coast or London's Liverpool Street Station will certainly never appear the same again to anyone who has read how Sebald portrays them. To a degree he wrote English literature in German.