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12 - Graphic Journeys: Travel Writing and the Medium of Comics
- Edited by Karin Baumgartner, Monika Shafi
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- Book:
- Anxious Journeys
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 06 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 08 April 2019, pp 209-232
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Summary
TRAVEL NARRATIVES HAVE BEEN central to comics from their beginnings: the early years of mass print culture coincided with new forms of transportation, making travel an early popular theme that endures throughout the twentieth century in figures such as Hergé's Tintin or, in an East German context, Hannes Hegen's Digedags. However, it is only in the last few decades that comics and travel writing have fully converged, as artists working in the burgeoning realm of non-fiction comics have turned to travel writing and reportage. In the wake of the international success of authors such as Guy Delisle, Emmanuel Guibert, Josh Neufeld, Craig Thompson, and Joe Sacco, German-language comics artists such as Ulli Lust, Reinhard Kleist, Sascha Hommer, Olivier Kugler, Sebastian Lörcher, and Jan Bauer have also turned to the graphic travelogue, exploring the narrative possibilities of comics to represent experiences of mobility or to reflect on the ethics of the cross-cultural gaze.
The critical success of the travel comic is on one level surprising: both comics and travel writing have often been viewed with suspicion, occupying a precarious position between high art and popular entertainment. What is it about the marriage of these two frequently denigrated forms that now appeals to contemporary sensibilities? Comics have, of course, generally undergone a massive shift in cultural status. Once deemed the realm of children, comics have in the last three decades finally achieved recognition as a serious art form capable of sophisticated storytelling. The mainstream status of comics can be attributed to multiple factors, including the international success of individual works and artists and the influence of markets, such as Japan, in which comics were more readily accepted as art. However, Jared Gardner argues that the new cultural cachet of sequential art is best understood in the context of the rise of personal computing in the late 1990s and the allure and anxieties of a new digital age. On the one hand, comics seem particularly relevant to new modes of reading and viewing that developed in the wake of emerging computer technologies: with their emphasis on the selection, combination, and navigation of multiple visual signs, comics share affinities with the “database aesthetic” of new forms of digital communication.
6 - Writing Travel in the Global Age: Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Reworking of Generic Conventions of Travel Literature in Ilija Trojanow's An den inneren Ufern Indiens and Nomade auf vier Kontinenten
- Edited by Carrie Smith-Prei, Elisabeth Herrmann, Stuart Taberner, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 10 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 125-143
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Summary
Transnationalisms in Question
ILIJA TROJANOW's LITERARY PRODUCTION provides an ideal case study with which to map the complicated relationships between transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Trojanow's fiction and nonfiction works are profoundly concerned with historical and emerging transnational networks, from the history of colonialism and its attendant forms of migration and diaspora to more contemporary forms of global trade, commerce, and activism. This attention to diverse forms of transnationalism reminds us of the complexity and ambivalent nature of the concept: operating on multiple, and at times interconnected spatial scales, from the informal and private to the public and collective, transnationalisms can offer liberating spaces for dynamic exchange and cooperation but also further entrench old divisions—for example, of sex, race, or class—across, as well as within, national boundaries.
This point is underscored in Trojanow's best-selling historical fiction Der Weltensammler (2007; The Collector of Worlds, 2008), in which the figure of Sir Richard Frances Burton offers a powerful reminder that there is no direct correlation between transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Burton's transnational existence fostered an admiration for other languages, customs, and religions, but this appreciation did not extend to all those peoples he encountered, nor did this admiration prevent him from utilizing his knowledge to advance British colonialism or the violence committed in its name. As Edward Said has noted, while Burton's extensive travels and his knowledge of various cultures may have made him an exception to many of his peers, he was not simply a rebel against Victorian authority, but in many ways its most effective agent. Employing the figure of Burton, Trojanow reminds us that lives lived transnationally may produce transcultural competence, but they do not necessarily foster the respect for and openness to otherness associated with various strands of cosmopolitan thought (for example, in the forms of moral, cultural, romantic, or kynical cosmopolitanism discussed by Stuart Taberner earlier in this volume).
Nor should we see historical forms of transnationalism as exceptional; throughout his work, Trojanow shows that the relationship between transnationalism and cosmopolitanism remains fraught. In the opening passages of his travelogue, Nomade auf vier Kontinenten (Nomad on Four Continents, 2008), for example, he argues that old myths and misconceptions have persisted well into the present:
Das 19. Jahrhundert ist in hohem Maße gegenwärtig. Viele unserer Vorstellungen von Differenz—bezogen auf fremde Länder und Kulturen—wurden damals geformt… .