In the Contact Zone: W.G. Sebald and the Ethnographic Imagination.

Long, J.J.

Abstract

In this essay, I address the question of Sebald’s interactions with ethnography from three interlinked perspectives. I begin by analysing Sebald’s reading of ethnographic texts in the 1970s and 1980s, using his own annotated copies of works by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Norbert Elias, and then situate this reading within the context of Sebald’s professional life during the same period. I go on to examine the comments on ethnography and related forms of representation that occur in Sebald’s literary criticism of the 1980s. These imply a critique of many of ethnography’s central practices: the ‘salvage paradigm’, the participant observer, and the effects of power produced by representing an unfamiliar Other to a metropolitan audience. I close by tracing the transformations of ethnographic discourse in ‘Max Ferber’ (the last story of Die Ausgewanderten / The Emigrants (DA/TE)) and in The Rings of Saturn (RS), and show that Sebald’s prose involves a partial adoption and partial critique of ethnographic representation.

Citation

Long, J. (2011). In the Contact Zone: W.G. Sebald and the Ethnographic Imagination. Journal of European Studies, 41(3-4), 413-430. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047244111413706

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: 2011
• Deposit Date: Feb 3, 2012
• Journal: Journal of European Studies
• Print ISSN: 0047-2441
• Electronic ISSN: 1740-2379
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 41
• Issue: 3-4
• Pages: 413-430
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0047244111413706