Searching for Sebald
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NOW AVAILABLE
ICI Press is pleased to announce the publication of Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald, a collection of original essays and visual projects inspired by the work of W.G. Sebald. The interest in Sebald has crossed disciplines, igniting passionate dialogues among and between scholars and practioners. This unique project, with its intricate weave of image and text, captures this spirited conversation in both theory and praxis. Searching for Sebald is edited by Lise Patt, founder and director of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, with Christel Dillbohner. The book is distributed by D.A.P. (Distributed Art Publishers).

Although many recent scholarly texts address Sebald's complex prose, Searching for Sebald is the first major study to explore Sebald's fictive world through the idiosyncratic and anti-heroic photographs that propel and interrupt his labyrinthine narratives. The book features an English translation of an interview Sebald gave in 1997 in which he talks exclusively about his use of photographs. It contains some of Sebald's most illuminating and poetic remarks about the topic yet including discussions of Barthes, the photograph's "appeal," the childhood image of Kafka, family photographs, and even images he never used in his writings. Searching for Sebald is the 7th in a series of publications by ICI Press that explores the methodologies of culture.

 

special edition
Searching for Sebald has been published in a trade and special edition. The special edition is limited to 100 "traveling suitcases," each containing a copy of the trade book and original works created by twenty invited artists including Antoinette LaFarge, Chris Rochelle, Tris Vonna-Michell, Tim Wright, Jeremy Millar, Daniel Lash, Skuta Helgason, Axel Forrester, Yolanda McKay, Christel Dillbohner, Suvan Geer, Pablo Helguera, Deborah Paulsen, Melinda Smith Altshuler, The Associates of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, and others. Each of the suitcases is named after an important Sebald personality.Click here for information on reserving a suitcase.
featuring artwork by
    Shimon Attie, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Andre Breton, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Walther Brüx, Tacita Dean, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, Vic Muniz, Adam Pendleton, Gerhard Richter
artist projects
  • Dorothy Cross
    "Antartica"
  • Christel Dillbohner
    "Wahlverwandschaften und Korrespondenzen"
  • Anne Flannery
    "Sebald's Invisible Cities"
  • Axel Forrester
    "Max"
  • Suvan Geer
    "Trying to Remember my Mother's Face"
  • Skuta
    "The Colorful Auras Found in Black & White Glass Plates of One Family"
  • Pablo Helguera
    "How to Understand the Light on a Landscape"
  • Antoinette LaFarge
    "All That is Beyond Hearing"
  • Daniel Lash
    "Translation and Repetition: An Architectural Translation of W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn"
  • Matthew Marco
    "The Minimalls of Downey, CA (excerpt)"
  • Jeremy Millar
    "A Firework for W.G. Sebald (2005-6)"
  • Helen Mirra
    "Rings of Saturn Index"
  • Chris Rochelle
    "Birdland"
  • Christian Scholz
    "A Sebald Portfolio"
  • Tris Vonna-Michell
    "Who is Reinhold Hahn"
  • Tim Wright
    "In Search of Oldton"
  • The Institute of Cultural Inquiry Research Team
    "A Truth That Lies Elsewhere"
essay contributions
  • Richard Crownshaw (Manchester Metropolitan University)
    "German Suffering or 'Narrative Fetishism?': W.G. Sebald's "Air War and Literature: Zürich Lectures"
  • Adrian Daub (University of Pennsylvania)
    "Donner à voir - The Logics of the Caption in W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn and Alexander Kluge's The Devil's Blind Spot"
  • Lisa Diedrich (Stony Brook University)
    "Gathering Evidence of Ghosts: W.G. Sebald's Practices of Witnessing"
  • Florence Feiereisen and Daniel Pope (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
    "True Fictions and Fictional Truths: The Enigmatic in Sebald's Use of Images in The Emigrants"
  • Mattias Frey (Harvard)
    "Theorizing Cinema in Sebald and Sebald with Cinema"
  • Christopher C. Gregory-Guider (University of Sussex)
    "Memorial Sights/Sites: Sebald, Photography, and the Art of Autobiogeography in The Emigrants"
  • Avi Kempinski (University of Michigan)
    "Quel roman! Sebald, Barthes, and the Pursuit of the Mother-Image"
  • Christina Kraenzle (York University, Toronto)
    "Picturing Place: Travel, Photography and Imaginative Geography in W. G. Sebald's Die Ringe des Saturn"
  • Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (University of Ulster)
    "Post-War Germany and 'Objective Chance': W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean"
  • Anneleen Masschelein (K.U. Leuven, Belgium)
    "Negative Indexicality in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz and André Breton's Nadja"
  • Bettina Mosbach (Bonn University)
    "Superimposition as a Narrative Strategy in Austerlitz"
  • Christian Scholz, translated by Markus Zisselsberger
    "But the written word is not a true document," a conversation with W.G. Sebald (1997)
  • John Sears (Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire)
    "Photographs, Images and the Space of Literature in Sebald's Prose"
  • Carsten Strathausen (University of Missouri)
    "Going Nowhere: Sebald's Rhizomatic Travels"
  • Markus Zisselsberger (State University of NY, Binghamton)
    "Melancholy Longings: Sebald, Benjamin, and the Image of Kafka"
with an introductory essay by
  • Lise Patt (Institute of Cultural Inquiry)
    "Searching for Sebald: What I Know for Sure"