A comparative analysis of “The rings of Saturn” and “Patience (After Sebald)”

Resumen

Abstract: This work presents a comparative analysis of W. G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn (1998) and Grant Gee’s film Patience (After Sebald) [2012]. As Sabine Wilke (2012) points out, Sebald did not provide a genre designation for three of his prose works, which means that he did not consider them as novels. Mixing up fact and fiction, his stories blur the line between literature and history, and hence establish a new form of “literary historiography” (WOLFF, 2014, p. 50). This hybridity is also manifested in Gee’s production, and this work explores in what aspects the latter can be considered an essay film, through the observation of questions of authorship and spectatorial experience. It argues that the book and the film are both based on a very similar concept of identity, according to which the writer and/or filmmaker’s I is but a tissue of citations from other texts. Likewise, it analyzes Sebald’s process of spatialization of time through the work of memory, and how this process is reflected in Gee’s inherently geographical approach, which emphasizes place and the mapping of consciousness. 

Key-words: Comparative literature; Intermedial studies; W. G. Sebald