Ester Nelly Abuter Ananías - Fachbereich Philosophie und ...

Anne Katrin Lorenz ( Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Deutsches Seminar,
Germany )
In-Between Chairs : Neither Cultural Stereotyping Nor Uniform World Culture
Even in times of worldwide exchange processes of information, wares and people, the
exotic has not lost its fascination and att raction. At the same time, these processes
draw deep trenches where people with diff erent value systems meet and heterogeneity
originates. Despite the interdependence of identity and alterity as a way of living
together, the dilemma described by Lévi-Strauss still remains. A persistent evaluating
view of the unknown that develops into a criticism of criticism of ethnocentric
perception ( Humboldt, Said ). From a European point of view, the affi rmation of
cultural diversity as a diff erence becomes diffi cult and unsustainable when it collides
with the universally understood rights of the individual ( e.g. head scarf discussion ).
A starting point to bypass this paradigm is to fathom the boundaries, where a fi xed
revaluation of a focused cultural identity ceases and the appropriation and levelling of
the foreign begins. Literary texts in this context run the risk to appropriate the exotic,
as a projection screen of the own identity. Among other things, it should be possible
to over-think the own perception and measure of values in a form of oscillating
pendulum motion with multiple perception. Especially texts from real or imaginary
widely travelled authors ( Fuentes, Barthes ) should be reviewed in order to determine
to which extent the works make cultural identities comprehensible as a penetrable
construct of ideas and a dynamical process by using irony and polyphony. In this way,
binary perception structures can be broken.
Email ak-lorenz@gmx.de
Section Th eories of Mobility and Travel Literature
Panel 90
Date July 31
Time 13 :15
Location k l 29/208