Łucja Rautenstrauchowa – a Tourist or a Traveller in Italy? (original) (raw)
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Polixéna Wesselényi’s Travels in Italy and Switzerland, the first travel narrative that was written by a woman in Hungary and Transylvania, is a work little known to the wider international public, as it was published in Hungarian in 1842, seven years after her tour. There are few travel narratives written by East-Central European women in the first half of the nineteenth century. This essay attempts to reflect upon Wesselényi’s personal motives, her intellect and literary craftsmanship, as well as the cultural constraints she had to encounter. The romantic nature of the relationship between Wesselényi, a married woman, and the fellow travel writer John Paget, is also mirrored by the text. Travels in Italy and Switzerland not only offers an insight into the relatively favourable situation of Transylvanian women of the aristocracy in the 1830s but also shows that it had the power to inspire the works of celebrated Hungarian novelists after its publication. Although Wesselényi’s style...
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Reader, Tourist, and Psychogeography Today: A Categorical Imperative of Travel
Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing), 2014
With the death of the author -whose intention is otherwise the chief anchor of the text, according to Knapp and Michaels -reading risks being led into the culture of mere interpretation, instead of reading as a wholesome experience of the rewriting of the spatial text. This gaze of the interpreter can be equated with tourist gaze given the theoretical analogy that the paper draws between reading and travelling. Considering Barthes' notions of jouissance and dérive in the reading practice is seen as a subversive, even perverse, and a travelling act at once. It must preserve the site of jouissance from all forms of reconnaissance and interpretation by another. Given the appropriation of Barthes by architectural thought, particularly Tschumi, and the treatment of the text as a metaphor for the city, the paper goes on to identify the aesthetic of delinquency in the spaces that English writers such as Blake, De Quincey and Conan Doyle have created, thus observing a parallel between the delinquency of the marginal figures occupying this spatial text and the reader's own. In this psychogeographical adoption of the delinquent persona the reader becomes one with the spatial text, thereby acquiring the agency to create his own culture of sociolects based on the text. Psychogeographical practices in reading are thus never far from the corrupting influence of the touristic-gaze -if such a thing could exist in the reading practice -creating a class of its own, based on its appropriation of the space and the architecture of the text, into one's lived experiences. This adoption of delinquency from the spatial text is prone to create a new other zone of marginals and delinquents in the lived society, which the reading-traveller should be wary of, and absolutely hospitable towards, while being hospitable to the other landscape of the text. The paper concludes thus by posing a situation in which the reader can be a tourist in his own text, and how this can be observed as a categorical imperative of travel.