Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15291/sponde.4997
Adriatic Stereoscopies: Heinrich Noé and the Literary Construction of Dalmatia
Maurizio Basili
; Università "G. d'Annunzio" Chieti-Pescara
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* Corresponding author.
Abstract
The essay examines Dalmatien und seine Inselwelt (1870) by Heinrich Noé, considering it a paradigmat-ic example of late-nineteenth-century travel writing, in which aesthetic representation, imperial ideology, and the construction of otherness are tightly inter-woven. The metaphor of the Stereoskop shapes the structure of the work: a sequence of isolated visual tableaux in which Dalmatia is not described to be understood, but rather to be observed and classified. Landscape and human figures take on the form of or-namental images, and the experience of travel turns into an exercise in controlled vision. The rhetorical strategies employed – fragmentation, the exclusion of the other’s voice, and the reduction of local cul-ture to visual folklore – respond to the expectations of a bourgeois Central European readership that, through the act of narration, seeks confirmation of its own symbolic centrality. The analysis highlights how Noé’s writing contributes to the construction of an “internal Orient”, projecting cultural difference into a closed textual space that serves the affirmation of perceptual hegemony. Comparison with authors such as Johann Georg Kohl and Karl Emil Franzos underscores the distinctive character of Noé’s vision, situated at the intersection of visual art, Oriental-ism, and the rhetoric of the exotic. The Dalmatia that emerges is not a territory to be explored but a repertoire of images already arranged for the gaze, turning representation itself into an act of symbolic appropriation.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
342491
URI
Publication date:
22.12.2025.
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