„To the Moon — and back“? Postmoderne Mondreisen bei Landolfi, Pelewin und Grünbein

• Authors: Jonas Nesselhauf

Title variants

PL

„To the Moon — and back”? Postmodernistyczne podróże na Księżyc w dziełach Landolfiego, Pielewinai Grünbeina

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Galileo Galilei’s observation of the Moon through his own invented telescope in 1609 ended hundreds of years of literary imagination and marvelous speculations about the Earth’s only natural satellite — for the first time the surface of the Moon became viewable. This marks a radical turning point in literary history: travels to the Moon influenced by mythology (for example by Lucian or Ariosto) are replaced by more “technological” and “astronomical” voyages (for instance by Kepler, Poe and Verne). Or, as Goethe remarked around 1800: the Moon now wants to be observed, not to be felt anymore. Another watershed can be discerned in the 20th century, and, interestingly, just after 1969 and the first actual Moon landing. The literary attention to the Moon and travels to the Earth’s satellite seems to decline. There are hardly any odes praising the “pale companion” and even science fiction literature is apparently more interested in voyages to Mars or Saturn. It is only postmodern literature, so it seems, that started to “deconstruct” the motif of the Moon in fiction and the conventions of travels to its surface, and thereby reviving the literary tradition again — especially Tommaso Landolfi’s novel Cancroregina (1950), Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra (1993) and Durs Grünbein’s cycle of poems, Cyrano, oder: Die Rückkehr vom Mond (2014).

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego
• Journal: Literatura i Kultura Popularna
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 20
• Pages: 49 - 64

Contributors

author

Jonas Nesselhauf

• Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken (Deutschland)