Alice Crary – W.G. Sebald and the Ethics of Narrative: A Reading of Austerlitz

On November 29th, 2011

Alice Crary, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The New School, co-editor of The New Wittgenstein (2000), and author
of Beyond Moral Judgment (2007) gave the lecture, “W.G. Sebald and the Ethics of Narrative: A Reading of Austerlitz.”

This talk centered on a close reading of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. The talk was intended to be accessible to those with an interest in philosophy and literature, and did not presuppose a familiarity with the book. The focus was on Sebald’s preoccupation with the relationship between human beings and animals, arguing that his use of an array of narrative techniques makes an internal contribution to his development of a striking, ethical image of this relationship.