The introduction to this special issue of boundary 2 examines W. G. Sebald’s rapid and sudden transformation from controversial and curmudgeonly Germanist to literary superstar as a case study in the “global valences of the critical.” The massive success of Sebald’s strange and variegated oeuvre among critics highlights a pervasive and troubling provincialism afflicting this supposedly global moment in world cultural history. Using Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the author links the emergence of “distant” modes of reading to drone warfare and concludes by calling for greater emphasis on literary translation.
This essay explores the various ways in which W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz upends traditional understandings of the novel as a form. Specifically, it situates this “prose book of an undetermined kind” against the rise of the steel container as the dominant mode of commodity transportation. The novel today is best understood as a shipping container giving refuge to virtually any kind of aesthetic or narrative content. The “stateless” (as opposed to global) novel requires a new model of individualism, a subjectivity embodied in the tragic life of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who lingered sans papiers for almost two decades in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport.
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