Landscape and Subjectivity in the Work of Patrick Keiller, W.G. Sebald, and Iain Sinclair

Abstract

Abstract Situating Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair as the three leading voices in ‘English psychogeography’, this book examines what, apart from a shared interest in English landscape and townscape, connects their work; it discovers this in the cultivation of a certain ‘affective’ mode or sensibility especially attuned to the cultural anxieties of the twentieth century’s closing decades. As it goes on, the book explores motifs including ‘essayism’, the reconciliation of creativity with ‘market forces’, and the foregrounding of an often agonised or melancholic subjectivity. It wonders whether the work it looks at can, collectively, be seen to constitute a ‘critical theory of contemporary space’. In the process, it suggests that Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair represent a highly significant moment in English culture’s engagement with landscape, environment, and itself. There are six chapters in all, with two devoted to each subject: one to their early years and less well-known work; and another to their more famous later contributions, including important works such as Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory (1997). The book’s analyses are fuelled by archival and topographical research carried out in London and Germany and are responsive to various interdisciplinary contexts, including the tradition of the ‘English Journey’, the set of ideas associated with the ‘spatial turn’, critical theory, the so-called ‘heritage debate’ in Britain, and more recent theorization of the ‘anthropocene’. In all, the book suggests the various ways that a dialectical relationship between dwelling and displacement has been exploited as a means to attempt subjective reorientation within the axiomatically disorientating conditions of contemporary modernity.