Perspective and Literarization: Italian Journeys

Research project P 14821 Perspective and Literarization: Italian Journeys Irmgard EGGER 27.11.2000 Travel-literature-studies are among the most stimulating developments within the cultural and literary sciences of the last decades, especially as to the productive tension between identity and alterity. Important research-work has been presented on the classical travelling-countries and -eras, in particular on the dixhuiti6me and the Goethe- period and on Italian journeys (see Brenner, Grimm, Wiedemann). In this range of cavalier, scholarly, educational and art-journeys, along with the famous literary journeys from Goethe to Heine, three decisively literary aspects, however, have been largely neglected: first the philology of travel-texts, secondly the process of their literarization, and thirdly the latter`s influence on the development of German narrative literature from the 18th to the early 20th centfiry. My project`s research-interest will therefore aim at the component steps of this textualization: vision and perception, adjustment of perspective (focussing - widening - splitting shifting); first elaboration as travel-notes; re- elaboration for print-versions; transformation into fictional and literary texts; emancipation of the structures and motives of travel-literature in wider literary contexts. It is the aim of my, project to analyse these processes and their literary relevance on a representative basis in order to fulfill the research-desiderata of a philology and a literary-history of travelling in Arcadia as paradigms of perception and narration on the threshold of modernity.

In the course of project work, its original concepts have been confirmed and significantly amplified. Various paradigmatic analyses of literary Italian Journeys from Goethe to Koeppen, programmatically based on intensive close reading, have led to a new understanding of their `profound structures` and have elaborated a `philology of literary Journeys` as the project`s most important result. Its most significant scientific advances are: - the dialectics of visual perception, imagination and creative memory and their dynamic scenic presentation; - the dynamics of image and text and the transformation of topographic visual strategies (perspective and panorama) into textual strategies, followed by their respective diversification and deconstruction; - the creation of emblematic classical Italian myths and again their productive diversification and deconstruction; - the progressive narrative development from realistic to fictional to imaginary Journeys;