The newest issue of boundary 2, “W. G. Sebald and the Global Valences of the Critical,” edited by Sina Rahmani, is now available.
Since his death nearly two decades ago, W. G. Sebald’s literary star among academics and critics has risen to astounding heights. In this special issue, contributors assert that Sebald’s transformation from controversial yet obscure Germanist to seemingly permanent fixture of scholarly monographs, articles, reviews, syllabi, and conference proceedings offers an instructive glimpse behind the velvet rope of global literary eminence.
His meteoric rise, they argue, shines a light on the hegemonic role the Anglophone literary market plays in the processes that authors and their texts undergo when they migrate from a national literary market to a planetary readership.
Read the free introduction, as well as Uwe Schütte’s “Troubling Signs: Sebald, Ambivalence, and the Function of the Critic,” available free through the end of October.
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