Shadow-Writing. W.G. Sebald and Photography

Prof. Dr. Hubertus v. Amelunxen (President of the European Graduate School, Switzerland and Member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin) will be the first speaker in the German Department’s Fall Lecture Series. Amelunxen’s talk, entitled “Shadow-Writing. W.G. Sebald and Photography” will take place Wednesday, October 9th @ 4:30pm in 205 East Pyne. The well-known photography curator (his most recent show was a 2012 exhibition of the photographic work of the painter Cy Twombly at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles) and longtime editor of the journal Fotogeschichte, describes his topic as follows:

In the 1930s Walter Benjamin called for photography to be included in the literarization of all walks of life. At first sight one might think that the idea was to subject photography to legibility – the emergence of art, literature and above all the general reverence of images would suggest that the literarization of photography and the photographization of literature and art are respectively different ways in which we attempt to counter the progressive decline in our mnemonic culture. Few authors have described the endangered realm and pain of the work of memory in words and images as incisively and impressively as W. G. Sebald.