CSF 2014

Literary world travels

Georg Forster Colloquium on the occasion of the Society's 25th anniversary on June 20/21, 2014, University of Kassel

With Georg Forster's Journey around the World, descriptions of world travel by Alexander von Humboldt, Adelbert von Chamisso and many other authors who published literary accounts of exploration, adventure and discovery in the 18th and 19th centuries, global connections and intercultural processes are attracting increasing attention. These texts still exert a great fascination today, not least due to the variety of forms and perspectives with which experiences of space, time and foreignness are conveyed and reflected upon. In our colloquium, we would like to examine and discuss this field from the perspectives of genre, perception, culture and globalization theory. Starting with texts from the 18th and 19th centuries, we can also draw a line to modern travel literature, such as cult books by Bruce Chatwin, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Ella Maillart and Nicolas Bouvier, through to biographical-fictional forms of globetrotting, such as those found in Ilija Trojanow's Der Weltensammler or Christian Kracht's drop-out novel Imperium.