FRAGMENTS OF MODERNITY: ON THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF SEBALD

Since his death in a road accident in December 2001, W. G. Sebald has become one of the most written-about contemporary German authors. Conferences devoted to his work have been held in Davidson (North Carolina), Munich, Paris, Sydney, Marbach am Neckar and elsewhere, and the secondary literature devoted to his work is now extensive – to say nothing of interviews, reviews, obituaries and further publications in press. While these scholarly writings discuss a wide range of thematic and formal aspects of Sebald's work, it is possible to identify a limited number of topoi that recur in almost all the criticism so far published: the Holocaust, trauma and memory, melancholy, photography, travel and flânerie, intertextuality and Heimat. It is my contention that these individual topoi can in fact be seen as epiphenomena of a much wider ‘meta-problem’ in Sebald's work, one to which only a small number of critics have drawn explicit attention, but which dominates his work from start to finish. That is the problem of modernity.

By modernity, I understand the seismic social, economic, political and cultural transformations that took place in European societies from the eighteenth century onwards. These changes have their roots in a longer history that goes back to developments that occurred in the decades around 1500 (the ‘discovery’ of the New World, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the emergence of mercantilism). These moments conventionally represent the threshold between the medieval and early modern periods.