120024 SE Literary Seminar (322) = Seminar (MA) American/North American Lit./Studies: (2009W)

Considering the dramatically increased mobility of ever-growing numbers of people and their frequent crossing of borders in a globalized world it is no wonder that the study of travel literature has become a legitimate part of literary and cultural studies. Many scholarly ventures, academic journals and regular conferences, some explicitly on "borders and crossings", reflect this modern trend which has fostered instructive analyses of travels and countries visited, often revealing as much about the traveler and his preconceived notions as about the region visited and observed.
The study of border crossings in North America and of transatlantic journeys has been part of an ongoing research project which has prompted the preparation of an international colloquium to convene in Vienna from October 16 to 18, 2009. The participants in the seminar will be able to benefit from the lectures and debates of international experts on cross border journeys and their representation in travelogues and fictional texts.
Among the authors to be discussed in the seminar are prominent expatriates or writers residing for a shorter while in Europe (e.g. the chronicler of the "Jazz Age" F. Scott Fitzgerald and Morley Callaghan). Richard Ford's Women With Men will make us focus on the expatriate experience at a later stage. In the seminar we will also consider the individual experience of writers frequently crossing the U.S.-Canadian border as is mirrored in the work of Clark Blaise, while V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South will prompt a discussion of a journey through the American South in the post-Civil Rights era.