“AUSTRIAN WRITER” IN THE TEXT OF W.G. SEBALD: ОN SOME FEATURES OF HIS PROSE STYLE

Abstract

The literary heritage of an influential German writer and academical literary critic of the late twentieth century W.G. Sebald (1944–2001) is considered in relation to the essential features of Austrian literature (as a special phenomenon) identified by N.S. Pavlova, and in the context of its important topics. The article traces Sebald’s rise as an outstanding prose writer in parallel with how his interest as an academic Germanist was focusing on the work of Austrian writers (from Adalbert Stift er, 1805–1868, to Peter Handke, b. 1942), how he was familiarizing himself with fundamentals of their worldview (distrust of reality; lack of confidence in the state, homeland and the language; deep intimacy with ‘things’; dominance of sensation over judgment) and acute topics (physical and mental pain, illness, homelessness, isolation). Some pieces of Sebald’s prose are compared here to the work of the Austrian writers (Franz Kafka and Th omas Bernhard in particular) to study his extremely mobile and multi-layered perspective of narration, which is characteristic for all his texts and lies at the core of the specifics of his literary style. The article aims not only to show some important features of Sebald’s prose (the multilevel mediation of perspective, ‘network structures’ within the text) in their connection to Austrian literature of the last two centuries, but also to demonstrate that they were formed largely due to his deep understanding of this literature.