Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Raphaela Knipp (Siegen)
“Touring the Fictive” – A Cultural Study of Literary Tourism
Literary tourism can be defined as the practice of visiting places that are associated with literary texts such as novel settings or the lives of their authors, for example writers’ birthplaces and houses. Although this form of readerly engagement with texts and places has become a recent topic in the academic discourse, the primary focus of these studies addresses the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. Little research has been done on contemporary forms and practices of literary tourism. As a consequence of this, little is known about the tourist motivation and perception regarding literary places.
Therefore the presentation looks at present-day forms of literary tourism and discusses theoretical and methodological approaches to its study. It will be argued that literary tourism can be considered as a form of adaptation by which the literary is re-experienced in a spatial and even material way. Developing this argument the presentation draws on data from a recent fieldwork at the Buddenbrook house in Lübeck which is known as the setting of Thomas Mann’s famous novel Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901). By analyzing data from interviews with members of staff and visitors as well as from participant observation in the museum, an insight will be given into the staging practices at the house related to the novel and the tourists’ perception of this place.
Raphaela Knipp, Master of Arts in Literary, Cultural and Media Studies, currently Ph.D. candidate at the Research Training Group “Locating Media”, University of Siegen, working on her doctoral thesis which addresses the practice of literary tourism within contemporary culture; her research interests include literary geography, reception study and empirical methods, literature and material culture;
Recent Publications
2012: “Narrative der Dinge. Literarische Modellierungen von Mensch-Ding-Beziehungen”, in: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 168, Stephan Habscheid, Wolfgang Klein (ed.), Dinge und Maschinen in der Kommunikation, 46–61.
2013: Navigationen 12/2, Vom Feld zum Labor und zurück, ed. with Nadine Taha and Johannes Paßmann (in preparation).