During a time when the global COVID-19 pandemic severely limits international travel, our seminar is interested in literary representations of travel and tourism by Americans to/in European capitals. We will discuss questions of (self)discovery, national identity (or its limitations), or commercial exploitation. Whether they identify as temporary tourists on “the grand tour,” fugitives on the run from unjust persecution, expatriate modernist writers, postwar leftist internationalists, or cosmopolitans, American writers have visited European cities for many different reasons. The first half of the seminar will focus on tourism and travel in literature prior to 1900. Among the writers whose work we will read and discuss are Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry James. As more “recent” modernist and postmodernist writing, in the second half of the seminar, we will read writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Ben Lerner.
- Lehrende(r): Maria Sulimma