Sebald’s writing style deliberately erases 20th-century formal developments

Evidence

When I read Rings of Saturn, I was hoping that it would be an exploration of these eerily numinous spaces. Yet what I found was something rather different: a book that, it seemed to me at least, morosely trudged through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at them; that offered a Mittel–brow miserabilism, a stock disdain, in which the human settlements are routinely dismissed as shabby and the inhuman spaces are oppressive. … Sebald offered a rather easy difficulty, an anachronistic, antiqued model of ‘good literature’ which acted as if many of the developments in 20th century experimental fiction and popular culture had never happened. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 505

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Fisher concept of hauntology and lost futures being developed across Ghosts of My Life — Sebald’s archaic prose blanking out the mid-20th century is a haunting-by-absence. — connects to: Rapid stylistic succession defined 20th-century culture but halted after 2000 — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 16

Broader Connections

• Rapid stylistic succession defined 20th-century culture but halted after 2000 #expands (0.72) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 16