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Abstract
Autobiography presently occupies a beleaguered place in education, not unlike teachers, whose lives have been diminished through the current emphasis on testing outcomes. This paper uses WG Sebald’s writings as a place from which to relook at the relationship between writing and a life lived. Sebald was a German writer born in the shadow of WWII who wrestled with his difficult inheritance. The paper considers the ‘phantom traces’ of the author in Sebald’s creative writing, using the example of the story he tells of Paul Bereyter, Sebald’s elementary teacher. Paul committed suicide by laying himself on the railroad tracks of the town that first denied him the opportunity to teach during WWII yet accepted him back to the classroom after the war. Apparent in the telling of Paul’s story is Sebald’s interest in an ‘invisible subject’—the prolonged effect of the past, especially traumatic events, on thinking, feeling human beings. The paper draws on Sebald’s particular way of writing about his subject ‘at a slant’ so as to argue for a hermeneutical approach to currere, or autobiography in education.
Acknowledgements
This article is based in part on scholarship done while a research fellow in McGill University’s Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Teresa Strong-Wilson
Teresa Strong-Wilson is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University, 3700 McTavish, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 1Y2; email: [email protected]. Her interests and publications centre on literacy, curriculum, teachers, memory and social justice education. She is an editor-in-chief of the McGill Journal of Education.