Intercultural encounters based on literary travel experiences

Abstract

The article shows how dealing with travel literature provides access to intercultural experiences and insights, and advocates the use of intercultural literary texts as a medium for understanding others as well as a questioning of one's own position and thus a self-critical attitude. Dealing with foreign-language and intercultural literature should allow experiences of foreignness that need to be reflected upon. With the short novel In July by Selim Özdogan as an example of this type of literature, we want to give the learners a secondary life experience that encourages a change of perspective and thus proves to be an extremely suitable approach to intercultural mediation. The protagonists themselves experience and carry out a cultural change of perspective, which a foreign-language reader must also understand. Because of this, we consider an essential goal of the didactics of foreign understanding in the teaching and learning of foreign languages ​​to create opportunities for learners to adopt other perspectives. The teaching-oriented contribution would also like to provide a practical approach to culture and knowledge transfer and intercultural communication using literature. A desired learning goal would be to achieve an open attitude in the learners who are interested in the world, which enables respectful, which enables an empathetic dealing with the generally unknown of a different cultural character, but also leads to self-reflection.