Image of the City. Pressburg/Bratislava in Travel Writing

The topic of this proposal is the image of Pressburg/Bratislava in travel writing from the end of the 18th century up to the present. I will analyse how travelogues represent this "little big city" of East Central Europe with regard to the conventions of the genre, the concrete circumstances of the journey, the identity of the authors, and existing discourses about the urban space of Pressburg/Bratislava. The aim of this analysis is to interpret the process of image-creation and the various functions of the image. I want to show the reasons and the means by which the image of the city is constructed and the various roles it plays in literary and journalistic discourses. I will consider particular travelogues of diverse cultural and linguistic origin (especially German, English, Slovak and Hungarian) from the standpoints of imagology and urban semiotics. I understand my project not only as a contribution to the history of the genre and of the impact of travel writing but as a contribution to a non-nationally oriented history of East Central European literature. The focus of my research includes various reputed German-language authors in the former Austrian and Hungarian monarchies, and later some authors of the first Czechoslovak Republic. The study is above all concerned with those authors who are missing within the framework of the traditional nationally oriented literary historiographies in the region of East Central Europe (e.g. Elsa Grailich). The image of the city is a typical phenomenon of a trans-media character. It is part of a widely differentiated inter- media network. Hence I intend to analyse travel literature with regard to its interaction with other kinds of sources, both written and visual, that participate in the creation of the image of the city (maps, panoramas, city plans, photographs, etc.). The inclusion of visual elements is necessary not only because of the complementarity of text and image in travel writing. Both textual and visual representations of the city are based on the same spatial imagination that will be the focus of my study. I would like to execute this project at the Institute for German Studies of Vienna University, where travel writing research once had a particular tradition. In collaboration with my Vienna tutor Ao. Prof. Dr. Wynfrid Kriegleder I want to reinvigorate this area of research there, which in the 1980s significantly contributed to the establishment of travel writing research as part of literary studies. The libraries and archives in Vienna, which contain many relevant sources for my topic, offer the best possibilities to reach this goal.