Discoveries, Expeditions, Transits - Travel Literature - Entdeckungen, Expeditionen, Uebergänge und -fahrten - Reiseliteratur mit Fokus auf den amerikanischen Kontinent (Literatur, Film und Kunst)

Adventures of traveling and exploring, exciting or uncanny encounters with foreign lands, somber scenes of cultural conflict have made travel literature one of the most intriguing genres. Travel literature reflects the experience of foreign cultures, but also exposes the fact that such experience is shaped by the traveler’s (and writer’s) own cultural background. Therefore travel literature sheds light not only on foreign cultures and regions, but on the familiar world from which the journey began as well. This course focuses on German travel literature about exploration, real or fictitious, of the American continents. Strategies of representation of the foreign, reaching from the documentary to the fantastic, from fact to fiction, will be investigated. Literature, films and works of art will also be discussed. (1 Unit)

Texts: Kehlmann: Die Vermessung der Welt (Rowohlt); von Kleist: Die Verlobung in St. Domingo. Das Bettelweib von Locarno. Der Findling. (Reclam); Roth: Hiob. Roman eines einfachen Mannes (dtv); Handke: Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (Suhrkamp); Federspiel: Die Ballade von der Typhoid Mary (Suhrkamp).