123426 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA American/North American Lit./Studies (2016S)

The seminar will offer opportunities to study key texts from the 18th to the 20th centuries reflecting the impressions of visitors from the other side of the Atlantic. The texts chosen range from observations on plantation culture in the American South during the late colonial phase to the encounter with different institutions, manners and customs in various European countries. The perception of difference familiar from studies of travel literature, a currently well-established branch of literary and cultural studies, is aggravated in the case of the American South by the enlightened critical view of 'the peculiar institutiion', slavery, the mainstay of the plantation economy, expressed by European visitors before the emancipation of the slaves. The encounter in the 19th century of graduates or common men rooted in the American South, such as Mark Twain, with different conceptions of university life in continental Europe and the impact of political and military confrontations in the 20th century on their perception of European societies will also be examined. Finally we will analyze the impact of different conceptions of individual and collective life styles on characters from the American South as mirrored in the fiction of Elizabeth Spencer.