Day 1: Saturday 23 November
10.30am - 3.30pm
Members: £55 Non-members: £65
Concessions: £20 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
Day 2: Sunday 24 November
10.30am - 3.30pm
Members: £55 Non-members: £65
Concessions: £20 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
W. G. Sebald (1944 – 2001) was one of the most original and serious writers of the late 20th century and this two-day course offers an introduction to his writing and ideas through the close study of one of his greatest texts. The Emigrants is a collection of distinct narratives, organised around four characters, three of whom are Jewish, who are fundamentally shaped by the history of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, above all by the Second World War and the Holocaust. Each character has been cut off from ‘home’ (complexly defined) and must try to live with their foreignness and proximity to traumatic memory. The individual stories are compelling, their details fascinate but as readers we are also kept at a distance, deliberately disoriented, unable to do many of things we usually do when we read ‘fiction’. How are we to read such a book? What can it teach us about historical memory and the writing of traumatic experience.
W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (Vintage, 2002, translated from German by Michael Hulse)
