Experience in montage: literature and photography in W.G. Sebald

• Grant number: 21/11744-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: December 01, 2022
• End date: May 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Lucianno Ferreira Gatti
• Grantee: Lucianno Ferreira Gatti
• Host Investigator: Georg W. Bertram
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Abstract

The research project intends to investigate the relationship between literature and photography developed by the writer and essayist W. G. Sebald, particularly in his last prose book, Austerlitz (2001). According to the initial hypothesis, the montage of images and text operated by Sebald would be his approach to the problem of the literary presentation of events in the history of the 20th century that put into question the concept of experience. The capacity of an individual to assimilate in his life story historical processes that lead to exile, death and destruction on a large scale emerges then as the central issue for Sebald and results in a work that challenges the autonomy of artistic means. The project will be developed in three stages: 1) reconstruction of Sebald's diagnosis of the relationship between experience and narration; 2) investigation of the literary mechanism of the chain of narrators as a reaction to such a diagnosis; 3) characterization of the status of photography in Sebald's work based on the relationship between document and fiction. (AU)