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This article examines Jamal Mahjoub's 2003 novel Travelling with Djinns from a transcultural perspective. Drawing on Wolfgang Welsch's definition of transculturality, I argue that the road trip plays an integral role in how the novel maps 21st century Europe as a heterogeneous construct. While driving from Germany through France to Spain, the main character Yasin adopts a fluid understanding of identity, informed by his experience of being on the move. Simultaneously, the novel conceptualises the European continent as irrevocably shaped by its history of migration, relating the road trip to other historic experiences of travel, migration and exile, some – but not all – of which linked to Europe's colonial past. Extensive intertextual references also support the novel's central idea that cultural encounters have shaped Europe for centuries. Since transcultural exchanges tend to be an ever-growing phenomenon in the face of mass migration, globalisation and communication technology, Travelling with Djinns sets out to underscore the continent's transcultural condition as both historic and ongoing.
Hybridität als Strukturprinzip in der beschreibenden und betrachtenden Prosa von Joachim Wittstock
(2009)
In all of Joachim Wittstock’s works, in his novels as well as in his shorter prose writings, there is a tendency towards merging the factual with the fictional. This study deals with literary travel descriptions, the impulse to my considerations being given by a text written by J. Wittstock entitled Auf Reisen which contains some of the author’s ideas with regard to travel as a literary theme. The present approach deals analytically with the following texts: Christian Schesäus Transsilvanus, Die dalmatinische Friedenskönigin, Toskanische Türme, presenting imaginary travels in time and to particular places on the one hand and creating fictional works starting from authentic travels on the other hand. The travel descriptons of J. Wittstock merge real objectivity with aesthetic subjectivity in their structure. Of their structural elements the following are mentioned: multidimensionality of narrative structures; predomination not of temporal successions, but of leit motifs which structure the story; temporally delimited facts are combined in such a way that the space is being simul- taneously presented on several time planes. Well, I think that one can state that in J. Wittstock’s works the travel is a form of existence and that his travel descriptions must be regarded as examples of postmodern prose.