Is this liberature? : words and images in Sebald’s "The rings of Saturn"

The paper takes up the example of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn to explore the relationship between words and images in the context of liberature. The audience is invited to follow Sebald on his journey along the East Anglian coast, but also to pose the question of discernment between books in which text is complemented with illustrations and those whose authors purposefully fuse the verbal and visual content to create a liberatic work. The analysis concentrates around Sebald’s descriptions of landscape, focusing on the narrator noticing particular objects against the plain coast as well as uniting nature and humankind in numerous digressions. A close reading of a few passages with reference to studies by i.a. Long, Jacobs and Cooke makes it possible to examine the narrator’s relationship with nature and the historical concerns stemming from his complex national identity. Both are subsequently set against the whole narrative and the form of the book. The second part of the presentation is devoted to a close analysis of a few photographs from The Rings of Saturn along with their impact on Sebald’s overall message. A reference to Stockwell’s studies on figures and backgrounds as represented in literature offers a cognitive perspective on the work’s multimodal content as well as its genology.