Klaudia Rixmann, “Mapping German-Polish Borderlands in Contemporary Literature”
Mentor: Karolina May-Chu, Foreign Languages & Literature
Ideas surrounding borders and their figurative meanings have gained increasing attention in the academic and literary world — but how can these ideas be used by students and scholars in the classroom? In literary works, physical borders are sometimes used to discuss social and cultural crossings that create entangled senses of belonging and affiliation. These relationships become even more complex when highly abstract borders, such as those between life and death or the real and the fantastic are added. This project maps the shifting physical borders of Germany and Poland during the 20th century, while tracing the journeys of fictional characters in the novels Katzenberge (2010) by Sabrina Janesch, Himmelskörper (2003) by Tanja Dückers, and House of Day, House of Night (1988) by Olga Tokarczuk. I use ArcGIS Online, a cloud-based geographic information system, to map these borders on layers. The maps are integrated into a story map, which provides more narrative and historical context. Viewers can scroll through layers to observe physical border shifts in the regions of western Poland, Silesia, Galicia, and East Prussia. Each location visited by the characters as well as the location of some symbolic border crossings is marked. The conglomeration of these mapped case studies will serve as a visual representation of the fluidity of political borders and figurative boundaries to students, instructors, and scholars. When completed, the map-project will accompany Dr. Karolina May-Chu’s planned book on The Poetics of Borders, Belonging, and Mobility in Contemporary German and Polish Literature and Culture, which is currently in preparation.
A great project and an excellent presentation! I didn’t know anything about “literary geography” and I’ve learned a lot. I can see how valuable the outcome of this project would be to the students and the instructors! This will save a lot of google search for some readers! Thank you for sharing your project with us. Keep on the good work!
Hi Hanyong,
I’m glad I could introduce literary geography to you! Before this project, I wasn’t familiar with it either. It really is a unique way of analyzing literature.
Thank you so much for sharing your project through this presentation! I am a big fan of literature, but I was not familiar with how it can be connected with geographic mapping. In reading and listening to your presentation, it made me think about similar physical and abstract borders that are discussed in many pieces of literary work. I can appreciate how using this technique would enhance classroom discussions about literary character (and real life) experiences.
Hi Sarah,
I’m so glad it also got you thinking about other works and the way borders are represented in them — border crossing is a universal experience!
What a fantastic way to combine digital humanities tools with literary and cultural geographic references. I wish something like this had been available when I studied and taught German! It is an excellent project and resource for understanding relationships between place and cultural meaning/significance.
Well done, Klaudia!