Writing after nature

a Sebaldian ecopoetics

Jason Groves

pp. 267-292

in: Caroline Schaumann (ed), German ecocriticism in the anthropocene, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

Although the melancholic disposition of Sebald's narrators can threaten to engulf the narrative in a temporal stasis, texts ranging from the long poem After Nature to the travelog The Rings of Saturn are open to a futurity that should be of interest to critical ecological thought. This chapter reads sites of disturbance in Sebald's writing as novel environments rather than merely the ongoing devastation of a traumatic past. The reduced ecologies of weeds and ruderals that comprise Sebald's environmental imagination subtly celebrate the regenerative capacities of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic ecological disturbances (storms, volcanoes, fires, and floods), they nourish a more-than-human future beyond the legacy of anthropogenic destruction, and they also yield an ecopoetics not predicated on an unpolluted atmosphere or unalienated life.