The Image Novel: Reconceptualizing Reality through Images in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project

Critics seem to agree on the fact that all iconotextual forms stem from the encounter and subsequent reconciliation of two media that have long been deemed binary opposites, images and words. However, if on the one hand an accord on the definition of “iconotext” seems to have been reached, on the other a proper genealogy of all the forms subsumed under this label has yet to be traced as some of them still lack specific categorization. It is the case, in particular, of novels like W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project in which the peculiar use of pictures and photographs appears to be fully functional to the authors’ intent to address the human tragedies of the Holocaust, the pogroms in Eastern Europe and the Bosnian war. While they might certainly be said to fall into the category of “iconotexts,” this term appears too broad to account for all the specificities of this novelistic form. One of the aims of this thesis is therefore that of suggesting a new name that can attest not only to the genre of provenance, the novel, but also to all those elements exterior to the domain of literature that have been introduced, that is, images. To this end, I propose the term “Image Novel” as it not only explicitly states the genre of origin, but it also acknowledges the diverse visual dimension which characterizes these works. In the Image Novel, the verbal and the visual are in fact tightly bound to one another in an aesthetics of mutual compensation which bespeaks a contemporary urgency to reconceptualize reality.