W.G. Sebald, podmiot romantyczny
W.G. Sebald, the Romantic Subject

Summary/Abstract: This paper addresses the construction of subjectivity in W.G. Sebald’s quasiautobiographical writings, Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, and Campo Santo. The fragmentary nature and ambiguous ontological status of the subject in Sebald’s prose allow him to associate it with the poetics of German Romanticism of the Jena circle, which defined subjectivity as a pure imagination that only synthesises experience. Sebald’s reported experience includes travels, reading and characters found in books, as well as reflections on the impossibility of representing mass destruction and death. The problem of subjectivity is made even more complicated by the use of photographs, which suggests the truth of visual perception although some of the persons or objects in the photographs do not correspond to their descriptions.

• Details
• Contents