CSF 2012

Foreignness and Interculturality.
Georg Forster as an Intercultural Author.

Georg Forster Colloquium 2012, University of Kassel, June 15-16, 2012.

Transnational and intercultural issues are at the center of public interest and in recent years have formed a now established and particularly intensively worked field of teaching and research in linguistics, literature, and cultural studies. Our colloquium is intended to further raise the profile of this field of work. In doing so, however, the state of the discussion means that it is now less a matter, as the editors of the newly founded Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik write, "of defending the research paradigm of interculturality against its critics than of protecting the term from its enthusiasts." Georg Forster has an exceptional and still widely underestimated role to play with regard to the paradigm of interculturality. Like hardly any other of his contemporaries, he overcame the narrowness of political and social living conditions early on by traveling widely. These experiences are articulated in his texts in different modes of experiencing and processing foreignness: foreignness is processed and reflected upon, overwritten and transformed. Moreover, even before the emergence of national scholarly traditions, Forster establishes an intercultural literary and scholarly practice based on diverse studies, translation, and mediation work that projects a dialogue with other cultures integrating European and non-European perspectives. This field is to be worked on with reference to Georg Forster and the late Enlightenment as well as to overarching contexts in the history of science. A point of convergence for the desired contributions could be the project to provide building blocks for an interculturally oriented literary history.