Italienische Reisen - Wahrnehmungen und Literarisierung von Goethe bis Koeppen

Disovering themselves by travelling abroad, generations of German authors have experienced their passages to Italy as a school of perception and narration. Dixhuitieme journeys and especially Goethes Italienische Reise, along with Romantic Italian tableaux, have created a rich Arcadian imagery which has become part of collective memory to a degree that allows 19th century-authors nothing but deconstruction and eventually aporetic dissimilation. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, we witness a new counter tendency towards metaphorical concentration (Freud), leading nevertheless again to dissimilation in the following decades. - Subject of my book is thus the dialectics between semiotization, aesthetic codification and scenic presentation of literary journeys on the one hand and their complementary productive deconstruction on the other - a dialectic process along the textual strategies of narrated perception. While 18th century travel-relations had already begun to go beyond the mere description of facts, Italian texts from Goethe onwards have become a literary genre in its own right, regarding not so much the presentation of real journeys, but far more Italian Journeys as a structural device of narrative literature as such. A gradual literarization of Italy as a collective imaginary space characterizes thus German narrative from Goethes Wilhelm Meister-novels to the imaginary Italian Journeys of Romanticism up to, for instance, Koeppens postwar-novels and beyond; a process of fictionalization that neither philological nor cultural research have so far seen in its context and which therefore represents the main research-interest and research-output of my book. The book owes important impulses to the poetics of literary journeys as well as to the cultural history of Italian journeys (P.J. Brenner, H. Pfotenhauer, E. Osterkamp, A. Meier, G.E. Grimm, C. Wiedemann, S. Oswald), while it analyses and presents literarization as the creation of a new, a literary reality from elements of extra-literary perception in the context of Italian journeys from the 18th to the 20th century for the first time in its own dialectic development.