CLCS 204T Story-Making Material: Creative Commerce in Switzerland
This Academic Travel will explore both ideas and practice surrounding the crafting, making, doing, collecting, and promoting of stories and of authorial personas. What are the different facets of Switzerland's creative, story-based commerce, and how do they shape narrative products and their reception? Via case studies of translation, publishing, museum and foundation centers and practices, as well as of short texts and author-based promotion, the course will interrogate questions of form, (re)presentation and creation and their intersections with the commercial drive behind the circulation of stories in Swiss spaces.
Students will explore the materiality of stories on-site as they visit book makers, publishers, sites of translation, libraries, museums and exhibitions, book stores, and book fairs across Switzerland, with destinations including Lucerne, Basel, Zurich, Lausanne and the Jura region. This travel will have a strong "hands-on" component, and will conclude with a reflection on the processes observed, as the students themselves engage in virtual and actual book-making and book promotion projects
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