Keynote Roundtable: Mark Anderson, Daniel Kehlmann, and Judith Ryan

Sebald situates his work in the gray zone between fiction and history, positioning himself with both proximity and distance to his subject matter, alternating between first-hand victim and third-hand witness. At the center of Sebald’s writing is the taboo of the “wrongful trespass:” a fear that either he will falsely identify with events he himself has not experienced or that his objectivity will dilute the emotional impact of what he describes. In response to this concern, Sebald creates works that straddle the boundary between fact and fiction in order to portray and grapple with historical events.

In this roundtable, Mark Anderson, Daniel Kehlmann, and Judith Ryan will discuss the relationship between fiction and history in W.G. Sebald’s work.

Mark Anderson is a professor of German and Comparative literature at Columbia University, where he is also the Director of Deutsches Haus. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Kafka and European modernism as well as several articles on Sebald, which have been published in several journals, including Representations and Critique.

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Berlin and New York. His most recent novel, F, was published in 2014.He is currently a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library.

Judith Ryan is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her main focus is the period from about 1890 to the present, which special emphases on early twentieth-century modernism and literature of the present day. Recent publications include a book, The Novel After Theory (Columbia University Press, 2012), and articles on “Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus,” in Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed., 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and “The Ransmayr-Sebald Connection: History, Intertextuality, and Critical Theory,” in Gegenwartsliteratur, Fall 2016). She has published some half a dozen articles on W.G. Sebald. Certainly his work, with its complex and often problematic relationship to previous authors and texts, its exploration of power and territory, its challenging notions of history, and its skeptical handling of narrative conventions, can be expected to continue as an important point of reference in her thinking.