Forum on 15: Heterotopias in German Literary Exoticism

Lecture by Richard Sperber, associate professor, Carthage College. Lecture topic: Scholarship on European literary exoticism around 1900 largely consists of modernist and postcolonial readings of canonized British and French texts, exploring either the self-fashioning of a European bourgeois male in an exotic space or his acts of appropriation. The recent spatial turn in this scholarship, textual examples from other European exoticist literatures, and the inclusion of non-canonized texts challenge these readings.  Focusing on German literary exoticism and drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this talk will explore the German rewriting of key spaces in British and French exoticisms, such as the beach, the hut, and the indigenous village.

Sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities, Germanic Studies, School of Literature, Cultural Studies and Linguistics.