Essai sur l'ethnographie littéraire

Use of realism in a novel can bring the reader to doubt about the fictional dimension of what he is reading and to question the potentially autobiographical connections between the author and his production. We are interested in documentary and testamentary aspects of realism, especially in the works of German-born novelist and academic Winfried G. Sebald, author of Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, in which representation of movement through space, boundaries and time is central. Is it literary journalism or proto-ethnography that he practices ? We think about another hybrid : literary ethnography, based on a significant documentary research work, as well as the authors compulsive information-gathering itinerancy on the Continent, allowing political critique