TY - JOUR AU - Chairatana, Krisdi PY - 2018/12/29 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - India as an (Imagined) Place of Precarious Self-Reflectivity and Identify Finding. About the Problem of Reversed Ethnology in Contemporary Literature: Hans Christoph Buch’s Reise um die Welt in acht Nächten (2009) and Anna Katharina Fröhlich’s Kream Corner (2010) JF - Journal of Letters JA - J of LETT VL - 47 IS - 3 SE - Articles DO - UR - https://so03.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/jletters/article/view/158833 SP - 77-115 AB - <p>The aim of this paper is to analyze two contemporary literary works of two German Authors: Hans Christoph Buch’s <em>Reise um die Welt in acht Nächten</em> (2009) and Anna Katharina Fröhlich’s <em>Kream Corner</em> (2010). The novels focus on traveling to India as a place where a problematic self-realization of the protagonists occurs through their Euro-centric foreign perceptions. This experience reflects the challenge in ethnological research of understanding foreign elements, which merely leads to understanding of the researcher’s own culture. This means that foreign elements act only as a methodological mirror. The two novels go beyond this problem and show that even effective self-realization is not possible, because the self – in the postmodern sense – is nothing but a product of discourses, which deny the subjectivity suggested by premodernism and modernism. A variety of methods are used to analyze these postmodern literary works, and confirm this interpretation.</p> ER -