Intercultural discourse in Dušan Šarotar’s travel book “Panorama”

The aim of this article is to present the novel “Panorama”, by the Slovenian writer Dušan Šarotar, as a special form of intercultural literature. Esselborn (2009) described intercultural literature as literature that is born in the area of different cultures and literatures. He determined several criteria that can be useful when listing a literary work among intercultural literature; from linguistic interculturality to intercultural themes, which include meeting the ‘other’, the different, the outsider, and from the biographical interculturality of the author’s personal story to collective interculturality as a common experience of a whole group. In Šarotar’s novel, the narrator starts his journey at the extreme western edge of Europe, in Ireland, trying to find peace and quiet to finish a manuscript. Later, he finds himself in Belgium, and finally, the story ends in Bosnia, in Sarajevo and Mostar. Our first research question was how much this novel fits into the definition of a travel book on the one hand and, on the other, how much the narrator’s story is a description of his own exile as the only place from which one can achieve peace or perspective. However, during his travels, the narrator has many possibilities for encountering the ‘other’ and for the construction of meanings through confrontation with differences. Therefore, we were mainly interested in the role this intercultural discourse has within the narrator’s condition of exile, and how much it brings Šarotar’s travel book into the framework of intercultural literature.