This book uses the annotations in W.G. Sebald's private library (held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach) to construct an interpretation of his prose style as fundamentally dialectical. Alongside his readings of writers such as Benjamin, Bernhard, Bassani, and Lévi-Strauss, it uses in particular Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialektik der Aufklärung to help develop a close reading of Sebald's syntax and narrative structures. The key concern of Sebald's prose emerges not as the Holocaust, but rather the dialectical processes of progress' and regression' inherent in history.

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