여행문학의 텍스트 전략 - 괴테의 이탈리아 여행의 이중 문학화

Abstract

Travel literature has been written since ancient times, but it has not yet met the proper research, because it has been regarded as a marginal part of literature without any normative theory. However, the need to research travel literature has been increasing since the cultural turn in the nineteen eighties. The first purpose of the present paper is to review the types of travel literature and analyze their text strategies and narratologies. The process of producing travel literature from real travel experiences to a travelogue covers three phases: prefiguration of the text by personal, social, political, economical, religious, and cultural features, configuration through verbal and narrative text presentation by the narrator, and refiguration of the travel writing towards social and cultural conventions including travel literature. According to conventions of travel writing text strategies and narratologies, travel literature can be classified into four types: documentary travelogue, realistic travelogue, revisionary travelogue, and self-reflexive meta-travel fiction. Based on this review and these classifications, as its second purpose this paper brings into special focus Goethe’s famous travel writing Italienische Reise, about his journey to Italy from September 1786 to June 1788. It took 41 years for Goethe to complete the work, which is composed of three books and was finally published in 1829. His numerous revisions over those decades reveal his transition from Sturm und Drang to classicism occurring alongside his personal changes and views of the world during his journey to Italy. Therefore, his Italienische Reise ought to be researched from the viewpoints of travel literature; it was transformed through the author’s writing process from travel experiences into a well-considered classical work. It did not conform to the conventional forms of the genre at the time, and is more representative of the intertextual and self-reflexive meta-travel writings of the modern age.