Traveling Bodies: Bodies and Corporeality in Travel Literature

旅行的身体：旅行文学中的身体和肉体

• 批准号: 505343076
• 负责人: Professorin Dr. Uta Schaffers
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Institut für Germanistik
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Scientific Networks
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/505343076?language=en
• 关键词: Traveling; Bodies; Corporeality; Travel; Literature

In contemporary research, travelers are often presented as characters who, while being on the road, resonate with and negotiate culturally specific discourses – individual and collective – of encountering and constructing the ‘foreign’ and the ‘other.' Traveling as embodied practice, the body as a medium of travel, and the articulation of the embodied traveling experience have so far been neglected by literary and cultural studies explorations of factual and fictional forms of travel writing. This is surprising since travelers are always also “traveling bodies” and the body figures as a central aspect of the travel experience. This embodied experience shows the irreducible interrelation of self and other; at the same time, it can entail feelings of irritation, discontinuity, (self) alienation and result in processes of othering. It is the aim of the international network to contribute to the scholarly work on travel writing by focusing on the concept of the body as medium of self and world exploration and the embodied nature of travel experience from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. A basic premise of our work is the conceptual difference between the embodied experience as it is articulated in the texts and the empirical traveler’s embodied experience while traveling. Our research will focus on the perceptions and experiences of the ‘travel writer,’ i.e. a media figure, the ‘I’ or ‘me’ in the text, who is part of the textual representation. The articulated and staged bodily experiences of the travel writer stand in a complex relation to the actual experience of travelers, as well as the traditions, conventions, and prefigurations/ premediations (Nünning) attached to travel writing.The network will work with exemplary analyses of texts, in German and English, that are marked as being based on factual travels since it can be assumed that there is a continuum (however complex, palimpsestic, revised and rewritten) between the traveler’s ‘actual’ embodied experience and its articulation and staging in the text. In order to prevent the exclusion of certain practices of traveling or articulations of travel experiences, we will work with a wide definition of travel writing. Focusing on various topics important for the traveling body, approaches and their theoretical and methodological implications will be discussed and explored regarding their value and productiveness for the field of travel writing in general. The network’s work will be made accessible in the form of a publication; moreover, the founding of a research center at the University of Koblenz is planned as a next step.

在当代研究中，旅行者通常被描述为这样的人物，他们在旅途中与特定文化的话语产生共鸣，并进行协商-个人和集体-遇到并构建“外国”和“他者”。“旅行作为具体的实践，身体作为旅行的媒介，以及具体旅行经验的表达，迄今为止一直被文学和文化研究所忽视，这些研究探索了旅行写作的事实和虚构形式。这是令人惊讶的，因为旅行者也总是“旅行的身体”和身体的数字作为一个中心方面的旅行经验。这种具身体验显示了自我和他人不可还原的相互关系;同时，它可能带来恼怒、中断、（自我）异化的感觉，并导致他人化的过程。该国际网络的目标是通过从文学和文化研究的角度关注身体作为自我和世界探索媒介的概念以及旅行体验的体现本质，为旅行写作的学术工作做出贡献。我们工作的一个基本前提是文本中表达的体验与经验旅行者在旅行时的体验之间的概念差异。我们的研究将集中在“旅行作家”的感知和经验，即媒体人物，“我”或“我”在文本中，谁是文本表征的一部分。旅行作家的身体体验与旅行者的实际经历以及与旅行写作相关的传统、习俗和预喻/预喻（Nünning）有着复杂的关系。该网络将对德语和英语文本进行示例性分析，这些文本被标记为基于实际旅行，因为可以假设存在一个连续体（无论多么复杂，palimpsestic，修改和重写）之间的旅行者的“实际”体现经验和它的关节和分期在文本中。为了防止某些旅行实践或旅行经历的表达被排除在外，我们将对旅行写作进行广泛的定义。围绕对旅行主体重要的各种主题，将讨论和探索其在旅行写作领域的价值和生产力的方法及其理论和方法论意义。该网络的工作将以出版物的形式提供;此外，下一步计划在科布伦茨大学建立一个研究中心。