Fabulation and Metahistory: W.G. Sebald and Recent German Holocaust Fiction

Richard Gray is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Germanics at the University of Washington. His research focuses on German literature and intellectual history in the modernist period, evidenced in books that span Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770-1850 (2008), About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (2004), Stations of the Divided Subject: Contestation and Ideological Legitimation in German Bourgeois Literature, 1770-1912 (1995), and A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia (2005), among other authored, co-authored, edited, and translated works. He is editor of the Literary Conjugations series for the University of Washington Press.

Through an examination of W.G. Sebald’s work, Professor Gray’s Katz lecture engages the conflicts between poetic technique and historical reliability that haunt contemporary German Holocaust literature.