Curricular and Architectural Encounters with W.G. Sebald

Reviews / Votes

"This noteworthy collection brings together an impressive range of critical encounters with W. G. Sebald's remarkable fiction. From a wide spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds, the editors' and authors' engagement with Sebald's work offers readers new understandings about times of Unruhe before and during Sebald's lifetime as well as our current time. With much poignant insight, these essays explore the multifaceted tropes of "relations among belonging, exile, and home" which were threaded throughout Sebald's autobiographical fiction. In turn, this evokes a "terrible pleasure" indeed of reading and remembering about the complicated web of human relations with other beings, their surroundings, and material objects. There is much to be learned from these readings in light of this world's troubled ecology and its need of a new kind of rapprochement between all." - Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Professor Emerita, University of Lethbridge

"Some manner of passage, or pilgrimage, is required of the reader (as for the authors) of this volume, paced by pauses and lingerings, within thresholds and on bridges, as things left unsaid in W.G. Sebald's writings are given voice through stranded objects sought and found, familiar buildings discovered to be strikingly strange, and animals viewed as kindred spirits. Undeterred by the tension between unmoored wandering through natural time, lived time, and building time, and situated being, these authors show how a unique style of thought-poetic, profound, and persuasive-can be used to radically reshape teaching programs, design practices, and being in the world, in ways that will not only be productive and pleasurable but just." - David Leatherbarrow, Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania

"Curricular and Architectural Encounters with W.G. Sebald. Unsettling Complacency, Reconstructing Subjectivity edited by Strong-Wilson et. al is the first collection bringing Sebald's literary oeuvre to educational studies. Reconceptualizing subjectivity as personal and communal literary, geographical and material formation, the collection pedagogically stages a stunning encounter between lyrical prose, diasporic existence, and material life. Featuring top scholars of literary, curriculum, diasporic, and architectural studies, this thought-provoking and critical engagement of Sebald's literature, essays and prose finds renewed educational significance in a time of uncertainty, pandemic, and global violence, one that parallels his own. The book charts new directions in curriculum, literacies and literary studies and will appeal to students and scholars of literature, education and cultural studies." - Aparna Mishra Tarc, Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor, York University