The Multisensory Constitution of Space in German Travel Literature

Maria Elena Bertoldi

Bust of Elisa von der Recke in the garden of Seiferdorfer Schloss near Dresden, etching by Wilhelm Gottlieb Becker, Wikimedia Commons

Bust of Elisa von der Recke in the garden of Seiferdorfer Schloss near Dresden, etching by Wilhelm Gottlieb Becker, Wikimedia Commons

As part of the work on the topic “The Constitution of Space in German-Language Travel Literature,” Marina Elena Bertoldi undertook a research stay at the Bibliotheca Hertziana Max Planck Institute for Art History. The research she conducted adopted a constructivist understanding of language and seeks to examine the constitution of space linguistically with a praxeological approach. She used both qualitative and corpuslinguistic methods. During her stay, Bertoldi immersed herself in the library’s collection of German travel literature written by women writers. In the process, she viewed sources as sedimentations of a linguistically changing cultural practice. Travel texts are understood as components, product, and depiction of a travel practice that show the constitution of gender and class via the description of multimodal space.