When the German-English writer, W.G. Sebald, began publishing in the late 1980s, readers reported never having read anything like him. What made his writing so unusual? Was it the unpredictable appearance of grainy photographs only tangentially related to the text? Was it the relentless blurring of fact and fiction, especially through autobiographical narrators, often named "Sebald"? Was it the flatly melancholic depiction of exile? Was it the mystery of genre: Were these autobiographies, novels, collages, travelogues? Or was it Sebald's paradoxical style: postmodern self-reflection portrayed in elaborate nineteenth-century sentences, including one that extends for over seven pages?

In this course, we will search for "Sebald," first by considering how his texts without apparent precursors indeed had them: the autofictions of Jorge Luis Borges, the periscopic monologues of Thomas Bernhard, and the photo-embedded stories of Alexander Kluge. We will then dive into Sebald's great prose fictions — Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz — examining his revolutionary style and the recurrent themes it describes: the unreliability of memory, the catastrophic history of humankind, and the conundrums of a non-Jewish German son of a Wehrmacht officer writing about the Shoah.

These themes touch on contemporary theoretical discourses surrounding trauma, war, post-memory, text-image, and autofiction. We will examine how these theories illuminate Sebald's and vice versa: how his fiction prefigures such conceptual "discoveries." By participating in own translations, Sebald likewise anticipates aspects of translation theory. At the end of the course, we consider Sebald's influence — following his early death in 2001 — on seminal contemporary writers such as Patrick Modiano, Rachel Cusk, and Jenny Erpenbeck.