•  
  •  
 

Abstract

In his article "Mental Travel and Memory Mapping in Sebald's Narratives" Jonathan White analyses several of the journeys — real and by means of the mind — by which W.G. Sebald follows what he once called "invisible connections that determine our lives." These connections are often although not always between the living and the dead "on the far side of time." In reaction against what Sebald interpreted as a conspiracy of silence in his youth over the destruction that Germany had caused and that which had been done in turn to it, Sebald attempted to reconstruct worlds and people destroyed or changed irremediably. Sometimes photographs are used in a form of communication akin to that which occurs between the living and the dead in Dante's Commedia. White suggests that Sebald's modes of real and mental travel are not only highly productive, but also capable of being followed by others in positive ways. Sebald's writing and the journeys of differing kind undertaken in it teach us negotiable routes into the uncanny.

Share

COinS