The Comic As A Strategy To Cope With The Other:a Xenological Research Project Of Popular Field Reports About China

This master's thesis is a xenological research project focusing on three popular comical field reports written by Germans in which they present their readers their perspectives on China based on their own knowledge and experiences. The main concern is the role of comedy when describing the other or the xenos (Fremdheit).The textual analysis focuses on the question of whether comedy is used as a strategy for personally coping with encounters of strangeness in situations of culture-clash. The terms ethnocentrism, xenophobia and exotism, introduced by Alois Wierlacher and Corinna Albrecht in their theory of xenology, are used to classify the attitude of the texts towards the xenos. Furthermore, the theories of superiority, incongruence and relief-which are considered to be the three most important theories of comical studies, as well as the normative effect of the comic defined by Halyna Leontiy-play an important role in the classification of the functions of comedy. In order to approach the term Fremdheit and its wide range of meanings in the German language due to the genuary variability when substantivating the adjective fremd, the three different versions will be applied. Das Fremde (the unknown thing or concept), der Fremde (the stranger, the foreigner) and die Fremde (the foreign country) provide a thematic access to the xenos with the three topics of food, people and country as objects of investigation. This research project uses the method of intercultural hermeneutics, established by Alois Wierlacher which unifies the basic ideas of application-oriented intercultural German studies and xenology.Each of the three texts talks about similar topics but they all have different views and perception of the xenos, as well as differing functions of humor. Many of the quoted paragraphs prove that comic is used as a strategy to cope with the different culture and each text also provides other functions of comic. Anja Obst's text "Fettnapfchenfuhrer China:Der Wink mit dem Huhnerfu?" is mainly ethnocentric and the predominant function of comic could be attributed to the theory of superiority, because it points out and laughs about differencies. Regarding the preception of the other, in Heike Barais's text "Darum nerven Chinesen:Der ungeschminkte Wahnsinn des chinesischen Alltags" both ethnocentrism and xenophobia can be found. The comic is often incongruent since unusual formulations are used, partly to distract from very harsh statements. Many of Kai Strittmatter's passenges in "Gebrauchsanweisung fur China" show that the perception can be classified as exotism. In some quotes comic is clearly marked as satire and is used to dissociate the subject from statements or to make the xenos look less strange by comparing it with something even more absurd.