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Writing After Nature: A Sebaldian Ecopoetics

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German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene

Part of the book series: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment ((LCE))

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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Jason Groves

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  1. Jason Groves
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Caroline Schaumann

  2. Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA

    Heather I. Sullivan

Additional information

This chapter grew out of a presentation at the 2011 ASLE UK biennial conference and has benefited from conversations with Axel Goodbody, Bernhard Malkmus, and Deborah Lilley, as well as the generous and insightful commentary by the editors of this volume. In speaking of a Sebaldian poetics, I follow Christina Hünsche (2012), who strategically and conveniently deploys this term in order to avoid attribution to an actual historical subject.

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Groves, J. (2017). Writing After Nature: A Sebaldian Ecopoetics. In: Schaumann, C., Sullivan, H. (eds) German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54222-9_15

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