15 July 2020: 6:00 P.M. – 7:30 P.M.

The Amerikahaus Literary Circle Online Discussion of A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain

I. Welcome

Until it is safe to meet face-to-face, the Amerikahaus Literary Circle discussions will be conducted online via Google Meet: To participate, please see the set of instructions attached.

II. Prompts

1. Consider the review by William Dean Howells in the May 1880 issue of The Atlantic: Do you agree with his evaluation of Twain’s travelogue? Why, or why not?

2. What are your abiding impressions of A Tramp Abroad?

3. Consider Twain’s running gag in exhorting the import of this being a walking tour of Europe and then eventually taking some other means of transport, a joke that’s reprised again and again (in the Penguin Classics edition on pages 3, 62, 64, 77, 79, 109, 153, 159, 201, 204, 205, 213, 234, 291, and 347). What comic scenes or humorous bits in the book did you relish the most?

4. Twain’s oft excerpted essay, “The Awful German Language,” in the appendix of the book has come to stand, in a humorous and self-deprecating way, as shorthand in attesting to the difficulties (for Americans) in learning the language. According to Twain, what exactly makes German so awful? Is he right, and was this funny? Of course, such musings are culturally relative: What would a Bavarian humorist—say Oskar Maria Graf or Georg Queri—might have to say about “The Awful English Language”?

5. On page 145, Twain suggests that, compared to Americans, Germans boil their food all too much. What other cultural differences did he note between the countries that he visited and the United States?

6. As a twenty-first-century reader, what did you make of Twain’s “agent,” Harris, and his role here?

7. In acknowledging that Mark Twain is exceptional by any means, what commonalities did you glean from his written travels that seem to be characteristics of today’s visitors to Europe from the U.S.?

8. In A Tramp Abroad, Twain seems to be playing off the trope of the so-called Grand Tour: If so, what did he learn by the end of his European sojourn?

9. What was your favorite scene in the book?

10. What did you notice or admire about Twain’s idiolectal style of writing?

The Amerikahaus Literary Circle is sponsored by the Amerikahaus Verein e.V. and Stiftung Bayerisches Amerikahaus gGmbH. .