CSF 2014

Literary World Travels

Georg Forster Colloquium on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Society 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 publishing literary accounts of exploration, adventure and discovery in the 18th and 19th centuries, global contexts and intercultural processes are gaining increasing attention. These texts still exert a great fascination today, which is not least due to the variety of forms and perspectivizations with which experiences of space, time, and foreignness are conveyed and reflected. In our colloquium, we would like to explore and discuss this field under aspects of genre, perception, culture, and globalization theory. Starting from texts of the 18th and 19th century, we can also draw a bow to modern travel literature, for example to cult books by Bruce Chatwin, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Ella Maillart and Nicolas Bouvier, up to biographical-fictional forms of globetrotting, such as Ilija Trojanow's Der Weltensammler or Christian Kracht's dropout novel Imperium.