The adventurous travels of a disobedient reader : a reading practice for the fiction of W.G. Sebald

This thesis traces an exploratory reading itinerary whose destination is a way of engaging with the prose fiction of W.G. Sebald (1944-2001). It reflects on the obedient reader as one who travels a straight path shepherded by the rhetoric of authority in a textual journey and considers the alternative paths of disobedience offered by Sebald's invitation to adventure in his four works of fiction. The appearance of a new writer of substance at the end of the twentieth century aroused considerable interest, not least because his fiction, written originally in German, announced a reception dilemma. The essence of this problematic lies in the destabilisation of the reader with the consequence that Sebald's fiction constructs what this thesis calls a disobedient reader. Made uncertain of the road ahead, this disobedient reader cannot surrender to the comfort of knowing that the journey has been mapped out for her in a way that enables her to trust the text. She must be ever on the alert, watchful for the unexpected and the unreliable by reading with a close attentiveness. This signals both her own capacity for disobedience and her preparedness to assume collaborative responsibility for the textual imaginary. Consequently this disobedient reader emerges as one who, from time to time, takes matters into her own hands, setting off on side-trips away from the decentred narrative authority of the Sebaldian text, expanding the reading itinerary in ways which cannot be contained by the journeys offered in each of the texts. The thesis identifies three facets of Sebald's practice which are deployed in the construction of a disobedient reader. These are his employment of a seemingly autobiographical narrator; his insertion of photographs into his prose; his drawing on a precisely indexed sense of place only to subvert it by constructing it as a textual space. According to the parameters of these domains the thesis considers the journey that each text offers to the reader by bringing to bear a watchful scrutiny which preserves the reader's interrogative and contestatory position free from the authority of the text. Finally I reflect on the notion that encouraging the reader's capacity for disobedience, affording contemplative and imaginative freedom, is part of Sebald's legacy to literature, offering the possibility of continuing travel into the unknown by means of a collaborative textual imaginary free of the discursive authority of any single voice.