Content area
Full Text
Markus Zisselsberger, ed. The Undiscover'd Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. 390 pp.
death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveler returns
Shakespeare
Hamlet
The Undiscover'd Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel, edited by Markus Zisselsberger, will take its place on the map of Sebald studies, assembling as it does a wide range of (mostly) excellent essays. Travel remains one of the most significant dimensions of Sebald's oeuvre, not least for Anglophone readers whose appreciation of the four prose narratives-translated as The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999), Austerlitz (2001)-and the long poem, After Nature (2003) as travel literature is not dependent on a knowledge of German. That said, all quotations in this volume are given first in the original German, and there is even one republished prose piece, "Die Kunst des Fliegens" ("The Art of Flying"), reproduced in German only, which might be frustrating for monolingual Sebaldians.
The book's subtitle does not imply that the thirteen essays (including the introduction) shy away from the kind of political postcolonial reading pioneered by John Zilcosky in his much-cited work on Sebald as travel writer. Even though these essays tend to emphasize aesthetic and intertextual issues with a focus on travel as metaphorical or figurative movement through time and interior worlds as much as real physical spaces, they all, implicitly or explicitly, figure travel as a trope within a broader context of exploration, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. In his lengthy introduction Zisselsberger argues that Sebald's "Art of Flying" text exemplifies the significance of travel for the author, bearing "traces of the generic combination of travelogue with biography; the representation of travel as an antidote to melancholy; the traversal of physical space as a means to arrest time; and, more generally, travel as a structuring principle for a kind of narrative in which the distinction between real, imaginative, and textual travel becomes blurred" (5).
The introduction voices the critical hope for an "unknown promised land of a new kind of literary writing, an "undiscover'd country" by the name of W. G. Sebald (17). Zisselsberger notes the provenance of the book's title in Hamlet, act 3, scene 1, but neither he nor any of the...