Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
September 24, 2015, 2:00 p.m., Odette Hall 323
While, during the 19th century, ,blank spaces‘ vanish from the maps, a strange figure appears in the geographical imagination: the figure of an explorer who has disappeared from the surface of the earth. Lost in the wilderness of strange continents and in the vastness of remote oceans, the ,martyrs of science‘ – as the German geographer August Petermann, following the French novelist Jules Verne, calls them – attract a widespread interest: they disappear under surveillance. Petermann‘s ,Geographische Mitteilungen‘, a worldwide operating magazine at the border of science and public interest, is one of the most prominent fields where such a disappearance occurs and is organized in notes, narratives and maps. Thus, disappearance occurs as a dramatic event, but it is also reinscribed into the routines of geographical knowledge, in ,proceedings‘ that make the act of disappearance perceptible and, at the same time, modify the perception of a homogeneous geographical space as well as the possibilities of its representation.
WOLFGANG STRUCK is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Erfurt. His fields of research are history and theory of literature and film, particularly literature and knowledge. Among his publications are Die Eroberung der Phantasie. Kolonialismus, Literatur und Film zwischen deutschem Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik, Göttingen 2010; Literarische Entdeckungsreisen. Vorfahren – Nachfahrten – Revisionen, Köln u.a. 2012 (with Hansjörg Bay); Wieland/Übersetzen. Sprachen, Gattungen, Räume, Berlin u.a. 2010 (with Bettine Menke).
This lecture is co-sponsered by the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies.
If you have any accommodation needs, please e-mail german@chass.utoronto.ca five business days prior to the event, and we will do our best to assist you.