After Nature

Evening lecture in the context of the ICI workshop “Reflecting on Images”, organized by Mimma Congedo (ICI Berlin).

The lecture analyzes W.G. Sebald’s take on Grünewald, the painter about whom we have only very few biographical data, and the writer’s engagement with Grünewald’s paintings as a way to explore models of realism and representation.

Publication related to the talk: Dorothea von Mücke, ‘History and the Work of Art in Sebald’s After Nature‘, nonsite.org, 1 (2011).

Dorothea von Mücke is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University, New York. In spring 2008, she was Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the ICI Berlin.

Her publications include: Virtue and the Veil of Illusion. Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Stanford University Press, 1991); with Veronica Kelly (ed. and intro.), Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford University Press, 1994); and The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale(Stanford University Press, 2003). She is a coeditor of the New History of German Literature (Harvard University Press, 2004) and is currently working on a book about changing models of authorship and creativity in the arts and sciences during the long eighteenth century.