Hotel stories

In this PhD study, hotels and hotel fiction are explored from a point of view that is shaped by the definitions of culture, space, identity and representation which cultural studies discusses today. The author analyses the development of tourism and the hospitality industry as well as a variety of hotel representations in fiction and film, considering both 'ordinary' and 'moving' hotels (such as trains and cruise ships). Hotels are defined as multifunctional spaces that provide ideal settings for hotel stories as they can present a variety of events inside a unity of space and time, which, in Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, is called the hotel chronotope. Hotel stories link experiences from everyday life with literature, combine private and public spaces, familiar and unfamiliar spaces and situations, times of work and times of leisure. They unite what at first sight seems incompatible and depend on patterns, internal rules and conventions for the successful process of this negotiation of contrasts. The fictional hotels' revolving doors see countless characters, staff as well as guests, come and go, present them to the readers and audiences and promise ever new and at the same time comfortably well-known stories which readers can use for their own escapes. As Glenn Patterson writes in his novel The International: „A hotel is already a holiday from the everyday world“ - be it real or fictional.