Adapting Venice: Intermedial Relations in Visconti, Sebald, and Kafka

This essay compares Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice and Vertigo, W.G. Sebald's first prose narrative, which adapts various texts by Franz Kafka, in order to explore how in each work the protagonist must re-negotiate his identity in a confrontation with his death, whether literally or metaphorically. Venice is never simply setting or backdrop to the action, emerging as emblematic of a cultural moment in which representation and reality have become inextricably entangled, and in which the human subject is unavoidably transformed.