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- Title
W.G. Sebald: The Ambulatory Narrative and the Poetics of Digression.
- Authors
Long, J. J.
- Abstract
W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is a text consisting almost entirely of digressions that swamp the tale of the 30-mile walk from Somerleyton to Ditchingham constituting the "pilgrimage" itself. This digressive narrative has to be understood as a response to modernity. Digression is a deliberately uneconomic mode of narrative, which resolutely refuses the imperative to be efficient and achieve goals with maximum speed and minimum expenditure of resources. The rejection of modern modes of transport in favour of walking and the rejection of an easily consumable text in favour of digression can be seen as part of the same project, a critique of modernity that emerges as a thematic concern in most of Sebald's work. Yet, this critique can take place only from within the very structures against which it seeks to rebel. Digression is always constrained by the end-directed coherence that constitutes its very condition of possibility - as that from which it departs.
- Subjects
ESSAYS; DIGRESSION (Rhetoric); NARRATION; RINGS of Saturn, The (Book : Sebald); SEBALD, Winfried Georg, 1944-2001; EXPATRIATE authors
- Publication
Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik, 2009, Vol 72, Issue 1, p61
- ISSN
0304-6257
- Publication type
Essay