Edited by Leonida Kovač, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Ilse van Rijn, and Ihab Saloul
When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of – as W.G. Sebald puts it – the “natural history of destruction”, comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald’s most prolific interpreters – as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant’s story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has – as this book attests – also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today’s migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.
Content:
Introduction (Leonida Kovač)
Sebald’s Writings, History and Voids
-W.G. Sebald’s Cartographic Images: Mapping the Historical Void (Anna Seidl)
-Imaging the Uncanny Memory: War and the Isenheim Altarpiece in 1917–19 (Juliet Simpson)
-The Worlds of Eternal Present—The Quest for the Hidden Patterns of Baroque Thought in Sebald’s Literature (Jelena Todorovi.)
-Seeing the Void? On Visual Representations of “Arisierungen,” Forced Absences and Forms of Taking Inventory in the Installation Invent Arisiertby Arno Gisinger (Veronika Rudorfer)
Memory and Art in and Through Sebald
-Monument and Memory (Mark Edwards)
-In the Labyrinth: Sebald’s (Post-war) French Connections (Catherine Annabel)
-Leaning Images: Reading Nasta Rojc and Ana Mu..et (Sandra Kri.i. Roban)Working With Images: Documentary Photography in the Oeuvres of Mike Kelley and W.G. Sebald (Fransesca Verga)
-Ghostwriting and Artists’ Texts: Raqs Media Collective’s We Are Here, But Is It Now? (Ilse van Rijn )
Writing with Images: Academic Practices and / as Ethical Commitment
-Models for Word and Image: Georges Rodenbach to Christian Bök (James Elkins)
-On Writing: Propositions for Art History as Literary Practice (Tilo Reifenstein)
-Memory, Word and Image in Sebald and Joyce: Towards a Transhistorical Ethics Communicated Through Minor Interventions in the Form of the Printed Book (Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes)
-Sebald’s Toute la mémoire du monde (Leonida Kova.)
-As A Dog Finds A Spear (Hilde Van Gelder)
