The page dedicated to what is known (rather inaccurately, in my opinion) as “lesbian pulp,” has had a considerable amount of material added to it, to celebrate the fact that my archive of the cheap, lesbian-themed paperbacks of the post WW2 decades is going ahead. Click the tab top right to see.
It will be lodged with Special Collections at the Library of the University of St Andrews. In fact a handful of books are already there. I’ll be adding to it, and though for now it won’t be as big a collection, say, Duke University has, I hope it will be a start.
To colleagues and collectors out there – donations, of course, will be gratefully received!
Yesterday I received an email from someone at Cambridge University Press to say that the long-awaited volume W.G. Sebald in Context, edited by Uwe Schütte, had recently been published. I have a chapter in it, which is rather exciting as it’s my first ever publication within an academic book. I’ve just been having a look back at how it came about…
When I was an undergrad with the Open University, I was introduced to Sebald’s The Emigrants. One of our (ungraded) activities was a university-hosted blog, and one day I had been thinking about the character of the “butterfly man” who appears now and then throughout the stories in The Emigrants. “Everybody knows” that it’s Vladimir Nabokov, but the more I read this unusual book, the more I was convinced that it didn’t have to be Nabokov, and in fact it didn’t matter if it was or wasn’t Nabokov. So I cobbled together a brief essay and blogged it. A comment appeared, from my wonderful tutor Dr Zoë Carroll – “Promise me you’ll keep this and turn it into a postgrad dissertation!” Well, up to then I hadn’t even considered being a postgraduate, so that was a life-changing moment.
At some point during my consideration of Sebald, I emailed Dr Uwe Schütte, who was Reader in German at Aston University at the time. Uwe had achieved his doctorate at the University of East Anglia, where his PhD supervisor was Sebald himself – I can’t remember what I emailed him about, but he was an acknowledged scholar of all things Sebaldian and I had always had the cheek of the devil as an undergrad, when it came to contacting authors and academics. I found Uwe to be very approachable, and we kept up our correspondence. Eventually I went to the University of Edinburgh to do an MSc in Literature and Modernity, and I made Sebald the subject of my Master’s dissertation. In fact the thrust of my 15K-word work was applying the principles of phenomenology to Sebald’s writing. Later, I re-worked it as an 8K-word article which was eventually published in Monatshefte, with Uwe kindly helping me out with style and content guidance.
Fast-forward to February 2021. I was at St Andrews, researching for a PhD on a totally different research field – that in itself is a whole nother story! Anyway, out of the blue came an email from Uwe, with as an attachment a copy of his proposal to Cambridge University Press for an edited volume in their …In Context series. He said, “Take a look at the attached, would you be interested in getting involved? […] I have you earmarked for essay no 21 but Heidegger is only one of many influences and it is overall a tricky essay, I think… What do you think? Does any other topic strike you as more suitable or interesting?” He had obviously seen the name “Heidegger,” remembered me as a phenomenologist, and decided he wanted me for that chapter. Well actually… I didn’t know a great deal about Martin Heidegger (except that Sebald didn’t like him), as my phenomenological reading was mainly Gaston Bachelard with a bit of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.* So I volunteered to do a chapter about Sebald and the East Anglian landscape instead, a subject he had already offered to people in East Anglia but who had not yet responded. In fact I wrote it fairly quickly and let Uwe see it. He said it was “very nice” but pointed out a few reasons why it wouldn’t do for the volume. As it turned out, however, one of the EA came through. But I was back to the philosophical chapter, if I still wanted to be involved. [*My interest in this school of thought was prompted by my great friend, novelist and phenomenologist Elizabeth Mostyn – see elizabethmostyn.com]
To be scrupulously fair, I have to say that a lot of the necessary research was only possibly because Uwe Schütte pointed me in the right direction, sent me links and articles, and translated texts for me that were only available in German. In my opinion what came out at the other end was as much a joint effort as a solo. Anyway, the journey from his first email to me to the publication of the book was two-and-a-half years! And I didn’t even come in at the first rung on the ladder.
Am I proud of this chapter? Well, yes I am. The circumstances, along with the format of the book, meant that I had to write to a pattern that didn’t quite sit right with me; but actually sticking with it, writing under a different discipline and to a different structure, writing outside my comfort zone, tackling philosophers I wasn’t all that familiar with (Wittgenstein, Lévi-Strauss, &c), getting it done and being published in a C U P book – yes, I’m proud of that. The work that Uwe Schütte had to do as editor was Herculean, and he too should be very proud. I remember a conversation he and I had, on Zoom or some such, during the writing of the chapter. One exchange went something like this:
Uwe: “How can you call yourself a Sebald scholar if you’ve never read Saturn’s Moons?”
me: “Well… I don’t call myself a ‘Sebald scholar’, that’s the whole point. Maybe after I have had this chapter published I will be able to call myself a Sebald scholar.”
Uwe: “Yes. Yes that’s fair!”
I still have the essay on Sebald and the East Anglian Landscape sitting on file. I might yet do something with that, if only use it as a blog entry here.
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Taxonomy Domine 