Abstract
[Autom. eng. transl.] From 1804 to 1806, the German writer Elisa von der Recke (1754-1833) made a long journey through Germany and Italy. His interest and his participation in the historical-political events that were upsetting Europe, his curiosity and acute observation make his travel diaries a document of considerable importance for a social, political and anthropological reading, as well as that landscape, of the places it crosses.
Having necessarily made a selection between the great wealth of materials offered by the Tagebuch einer Reise (Berlin 1815-1817), I chose to focus my analysis on the fourth volume, and precisely on the part concerning the stay in Turin, the passage of Mont Cenis and the visit from Savoy to Switzerland; here the small group of travelers, alarmed beyond measure by the developments of the Napoleonic campaigns, decided to return quickly to their homeland and abruptly interrupted the journey. The dominant element is therefore the geography of Savoy, marked by the experience of the mountains and the Alpine space.
Travel stories are legitimized on the assumption "I write what I see", they are based on an empirical and perceptive perspective that guarantees adherence to reality and therefore makes the journey an opportunity for a discursive construction / reproduction of places as objects of knowledge . The relationship between seeing and knowing is very close, since seeing is not just a cognitive process, but an activity that takes place in a specific context and through specific techniques, choosing a certain point of view and particular observation methods.
In this contribution I propose to investigate how the different modes of vision take shape and are transmitted in the text: descriptive strategies, deictics, lexical choices and, in particular, the verbs of perception. What is interesting to analyze is therefore the relationship between the discursive structure of the text and perceived reality, the linguistic signs through which one's vision of reality is transmitted and, in this case, the experience of the Alpine space.
Translated title of the contribution | [Autom. eng. transl.] Ways of seeing, ways of traveling. The experience of the Alps in Elisa von der Recke's travelogue |
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Original language | Italian |
Title of host publication | Scritture e linguaggi del turismo. Viaggi tra parole, interpretazioni, esperienze |
Editors | Laura Balbiani, Dorit Kluge |
Pages | 23-46 |
Number of pages | 24 |
Publication status | Published - 2017 |
Keywords
- resoconto di viaggio
- semiotica
- tecniche di scrittura