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SUMMARY:To Be or Not to Be a Tourist - Tourist Ways of Narrating in German
 -Speaking Prose on India - Daniela Dora - SCR
DTSTART:20180306T210000Z
DTEND:20180306T213000Z
UID:TALK102451@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Stephan Ursprung
DESCRIPTION:The dichotomous divide between the figure of the tourist and v
 arious other\, non-tourist traveling subjects is deeply rooted in the hist
 ory of travel and tourism. A seemingly irresolvable contradiction has been
  attached to modern tourism from its very beginning in the 19th century - 
 travellers' inevitable participation in tourist structures and their simul
 taneous rejection of all things touristy. In the 1990s\, literary scholar 
 Jonathan Culler spoke of the "centrality" that tourism occupies in our pre
 sent day life and dwelled on the cultural implications of omnipresent tour
 ist practices. Likewise\, philosopher Zygmunt Bauman asserts that tourism 
 has gradually moved from the "margins" of "social action" to the "centre o
 f action" (Bauman 1997). He sets up a typology of postmodern lifestyles in
  which the figure of the tourist takes on a collective metaphorical functi
 on for the contemporary life in Western societies and their symptomatic fe
 ar of attachment and determination. Against this backdrop tourism is incre
 asingly understood as the cultural travel practice of the present (Biernat
  2004). Taking selected German-speaking works about India as examples\, th
 is talk seeks to analyse in what respect the narrators of literary travelo
 gues are characterised by tourist experiences\, perceptions and practices 
 and how these manifest themselves as particular narrative strategies in th
 e literary medium. Can we identify specifically 'tourist' forms of writing
 ? By no means is tourism explored for the first time in literary texts. Ho
 wever\, what has so far only been considered in a very rudimentary fashion
  are narrative strategies of tourist writing and their significance for tr
 avel literature as a whole. 
LOCATION:Senior Parlour\, Gonville and Caius College
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