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Writing after nature
a Sebaldian ecopoetics
pp. 267-292
Abstract
Although the melancholic disposition of Sebald's narrators can threaten to engulf the narrative in a temporal stasis, texts ranging from the long poem After Nature to the travelog The Rings of Saturn are open to a futurity that should be of interest to critical ecological thought. This chapter reads sites of disturbance in Sebald's writing as novel environments rather than merely the ongoing devastation of a traumatic past. The reduced ecologies of weeds and ruderals that comprise Sebald's environmental imagination subtly celebrate the regenerative capacities of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic ecological disturbances (storms, volcanoes, fires, and floods), they nourish a more-than-human future beyond the legacy of anthropogenic destruction, and they also yield an ecopoetics not predicated on an unpolluted atmosphere or unalienated life.
Publication details
Published in:
Schaumann Caroline (2017) German ecocriticism in the anthropocene. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Pages: 267-292
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-54222-9_15
Full citation:
Groves Jason (2017) „Writing after nature: a Sebaldian ecopoetics“, In: C. Schaumann (ed.), German ecocriticism in the anthropocene, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 267–292.