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The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

I First Learned about Russia from Dostoievski. Literature as an Imaginary Way of Understanding Another Country.

Chair of the section/Suggestions, Abstracts, Contributions to:
Email: Peter Horn (Pretoria)

ABSTRACT: In order to understand literary texts, one must know something about the country. In order to understand what it means when somebody is transferred to Hinterpommern, one must comprehend what this stretch of land signaled in 19th-century Prussia. Only then will one understand a great deal in Fontane's Effi Briest. Inversely, however, Fontane's novel opens up the world of ideas, values and social classes of Prussia at that time.

Literature is therefore a way to approach the foreign, to learn to understand it. It mediates much more than a trip to the country itself that is not well planned.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES