Mapping Ultima Thule
Studien zur Germanistik, Skandinavistik und Übersetzungskultur
Herausgegeben von Stefan H. Kaszyński, Andrzej Kątny, Maria Krysztofiak und Beate Sommerfeld
Band 21
Agata Lubowicka
Mapping Ultima Thule
Representations of North Greenland in the Expedition Accounts of Knud Rasmussen
Translated by Patrycja Poniatowska
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
The publication was funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education as a part of the National ‘Programme for the Development of the Humanities’ in the years 2018-2019, project number 21H 17 0258 85. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Ministry cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Cover illustration: © Shutterstock.com/Marzolino
Reviewers: Maria Krysztofiak-Kaszyńska, Hieronim Chojnacki
Proofreading: Elaine Horyza, Tomasz Gałąka
The publication of the Polish version of the book was funded by the Foundation for Polish Science’s programme “Monographs” in 2017.
ISSN 2192-3310
ISBN 978-3-631-79764-8 (Print) · E-ISBN 978-3-631-80163-5 (E-PDF)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-80164-2 (EPUB) · E-ISBN 978-3-631-80165-9 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/
© Peter Lang GmbH
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2020
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When you enter Arctic narrative, you enter every narrative of the Arctic ever written. When you enter the Arctic in person, you become part of the extended text. When you write the Arctic to affirm your presence in the world, you become in writing an imaginative creation. You could imagine anything and write it down and it would seem real forever.
John Moss, Enduring Dreams1
1 John Moss, Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape (Ontario: Anansi, 1994), p. 105.
For Michael
Acknowledgement
This book grew out of my PhD project, which I completed at the University of Gdańsk in 2014. My warmest thanks go to Professor Maria Sibińska, my PhD advisor, who inspired, helped and generously shared her expertise with me. I am also grateful to my referees, Professor Maria Krzysztofiak-Kaszyńska and Professor Hieronim Chojnacki, for their valuable comments and suggestions.
About the author
Agata Lubowicka is a lecturer in Danish Literature and Scandinavian Culture at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. She has authored numerous publications on the cultural significance of past and present narratives of Scandinavian polar exploration.
About the book
The book addresses the relationship between the historical process of the Danish colonization of North Greenland and the literary representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit people in Knud Rasmussen’s expedition accounts The New People and My Travel Diary. The two works are read side by side to showcase the ambivalence inherent in representing North Greenland and the Inughuit, and, through this, to highlight common mechanisms and cultural practices involved in the mapping of the Other in the context of asymmetrical power relations. Applying a textual approach founded on colonial discourse analysis, the reading asserts that literary mappings of geography and identity can never be stable, as they are in a constant flux, perpetually recontextualized and reinvented.
Citability of the eBook
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Contents
1 Greenland and Greenlanders in Danish Discourse
3 Research on Knud Rasmussen’s Literary Work
5.1 Cultural and telluric Other
5.2 Inuit, Inughuit, Eskimos and Greenlanders
5.4 The spelling of local names and words in the Greenlandic language
1 Colonial Discourse and Representation Analysis
2 The Split Subject and Ambivalence