Prof. Dr. Laura Scuriatti participated in the workshop of the research network Writing 1900 in Copenhagen on the topic of Literary Love Tourism and Travel Writing

From May 24-27, Prof. Dr. Laura Scuriatti participated in the workshop of the research network Writing 1900 held in Copenhagen, Denmark on the topic of Literary Love Tourism and Travel Writing. Her paper was entitled "Vicarious Travels: Literature, Friendship, Artificiality", and explored the concept of "vicariousness" as applied to literature in the second degree—in this case, literary works which recreate or retell experiences of travel already at the center of previous texts.

Scuriatti’s paper focused, in particular, on Mary Berenson's A Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast (1938), Carl Van Vechten's Peter Whiffle (1922), and George Moore's The Confessions of a Young Man (1886 and 1888), and showed how all these works, which we might consider as autofictional avant la lettre, draw attention to the artificiality of the travel experiences described, also in order to create literary spaces for both unconventional love and queer desire.

Post Date: 06-12-2024