Between 'surface illusionism' and 'awful depth': Reflections on the poetological and generic ambivalence of W. G. Sebald's Logis in einem Landhaus
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In: Journal of European studies : literature and ideas from the Renaissance to the present, Vol. 41, No. 3-4, 12.2011, p. 449-465.
Research output: Journal contributions › Journal articles › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Between 'surface illusionism' and 'awful depth'
T2 - Reflections on the poetological and generic ambivalence of W. G. Sebald's Logis in einem Landhaus
AU - Albes, Claudia
PY - 2011/12
Y1 - 2011/12
N2 - Within W. G. Sebald’s oeuvre, Logis in einem Landhaus (LieL, 1998), a collection of essays on five writers who wrote in Swabian-Alemanic or Swiss (French/German) and Jan Peter Tripp, the illusionist painter from the Allgäu, has a multiply ambivalent position. Although the essays can be characterized as Dichterporträts that are rounded off by a more conventional art-historical study, the former have clear generic affinities with biography, the literary-critical essay, literary history and autobiography. As such, they oscillate between the depiction of what is known on the one hand and critical reflection on the other. Sebald said that beneath the apparently realistic surface of Tripp’s visual work there lay concealed ‘an awful depth’ (LieL: 181), and his portraits have the same ambivalence about them: carefully arranged collections of well-known fragments that recall individual writers conceal dizzying reflections about the nature of (auto)biography, literary criticism and literary history.
AB - Within W. G. Sebald’s oeuvre, Logis in einem Landhaus (LieL, 1998), a collection of essays on five writers who wrote in Swabian-Alemanic or Swiss (French/German) and Jan Peter Tripp, the illusionist painter from the Allgäu, has a multiply ambivalent position. Although the essays can be characterized as Dichterporträts that are rounded off by a more conventional art-historical study, the former have clear generic affinities with biography, the literary-critical essay, literary history and autobiography. As such, they oscillate between the depiction of what is known on the one hand and critical reflection on the other. Sebald said that beneath the apparently realistic surface of Tripp’s visual work there lay concealed ‘an awful depth’ (LieL: 181), and his portraits have the same ambivalence about them: carefully arranged collections of well-known fragments that recall individual writers conceal dizzying reflections about the nature of (auto)biography, literary criticism and literary history.
KW - Didactics of the German language
KW - Literature studies
KW - (auto)biography
KW - Dichterporträts
KW - Eduard Mörike
KW - Gottfried Keller
KW - Heinrich von Kleist
KW - Jan Peter Tripp
KW - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
KW - Johann Peter Hebel
KW - Robert Walser
KW - subjectivity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=83755167809&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0047244111413696
DO - 10.1177/0047244111413696
M3 - Journal articles
VL - 41
SP - 449
EP - 465
JO - Journal of European studies : literature and ideas from the Renaissance to the present
JF - Journal of European studies : literature and ideas from the Renaissance to the present
SN - 0047-2441
IS - 3-4
ER -