Letter of support for Jan Bormapplication to a fundamental chair at l’Institut Universitaire de France IUF WRITING GREENLAND – WRITING GREENLAND IN ENGLISH – FROM TROPOLOGY TO EPISTEME”
Résumé
WRITING GREENLAND is dedicated to the study of Anglophone travelogues about Greenland in the 20th and 21st century which have not been analysed together as a corpus before. The perception of Greenland has become an increasingly important topic, especially in recent times, as Lóa St. Kristjánsdóttir notes . Many explorers, travellers and visitors have written about their experience in Greenland and some of these authors are very well-known. Outstanding figures of the first half of the 20th century, albeit controversial and/or celebrated, such as Robert Edwin Parry who claimed to have conquered the North-Pole , Knud Rasmussen , or Peter Freuchen , have received critical attention repeatedly. However, while Greenland has increasingly moved into the limelight of international attention in the past few years, comprehensive literary and cultural studies about specific Greenlandic corpora remain limited, notable examples being Jean Malaurie’s groundbreaking study of explorers having reached North-West Greenland before him, Ultima Thulé , or, more recently, the two-volume set Denmark and the New North Atlantic which focuses in large parts on contemporary Greenland , but not principally from a literary criticism angle. Given the current exposure of Greenland to widespread media coverage up to the point of becoming a geopolitical focus area, it appears timely and necessary to provide an in-depth study of travelogues about Greenland in the 20th and 21st century, a subject that clearly represents a research gap both within the field of travel writing studies and more generally Arctic studies.