Studies in Travel Writing L'étrangement du voyageur (original) (raw)

Travel as Disenchantment: A Perspective in Transformation

Rupkatha Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2011

Exploration accounts pursuing a rather austere and closed journal-format had to adhere to an already-established type or structure of narrative. In several cases this act of adherence stands out as a highly self conscious narrative device. The narrative then perceives itself to be a continual of previous narratives that established the 'modes' in the first place. But the narrative equally identifies itself as a 'predecessor narrative' that would eventually affect as well as guide 'successor' narratives. The result normally is a cluster of narratives that defines a specific locale across a certain time-span. The traditional use of the first-person narration employing an experiencing 'I' has been the customary way of attesting to the much needed element of veracity. In representative early exploration narratives written by Continental explorers it is possible to discern different shades of 'reality' differently cognized. It is apparent, then, that what is played on the narrative level is even more than the essential cultural-political significations; it is also the author's location in terms of discursive engagement that is pinpointed. Textualisation or narrativisation becomes linguistic devices of stratification, codification that successfully naturalises the cultural shock of an initial contact. Through an analysis of the 'worlding' process discernible in two representative early exploration narratives this paper tries to show the ways a narrative manufactures its own points of reference and structures of significations in order to facilitate its individual agenda.

Travel's Others: Realism, Location, Dislocation

Journeys, 2015

This article explores the realist novel's reliance on the discourse of travel developed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the discourse that authorized self-styled travelers over against the vulgar and proliferating tourists. Taking Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary as a case study, the article shows how the novel structures itself around the sets of oppositions travel discourse employed, most notably that of stasis and mobility, or dwelling and traveling. The fictional narrator strives for authority over against a set of characters differently figured as fixed in place or in entrenched mentalities, and Flaubert's masterful use of free indirect style becomes the narrator's means of establishing that authority through the demonstration of unparalleled mental mobility the technique affords.

Deciphering Select Travel Writings in the Context of Postmodern Hermeneutics

Iyal Publications, 2017

Travel writing as a literary genre has not been able to create its distinct identity and has been confined to the field of creative writing i.e. magazines, newspaper and tourist guidebooks. Even in terms of literariness travel writings have not been seen beyond the broader spectrum of Postcolonial and Diaspora studies; and it continues to be a marginal discipline which is incarcerated within minor forms of literature. This paper aims to look at travel writing as distinct genre with reference to contemporary theory which has reinvigorated it by creating a hermeneutic drift, thereby, creating a heterotopias space promenading a culture of travel infused with tourism, simulation, globalization, acculturation, postmodern geography, and commoditization of space and place in travelogues of writers like Thomas Moore, Jonathan Swift, Salman Rushdie, V.S Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and so on. Travel writing, when seen from the lens of postmodernist, it can be related with theories of presence-absence, existence-extinction, utopia-dystopia, colonial-postcolonial, and so on. Travelogues have propounded their own theory which gives insight about the politics, positionality, spatiality and praxis of travel writing and the various dimensions of knowledge associated with postmodern, postcolonial, gender, and cultural theory. In terms of postmodern and postcolonial hermeneutics, travel writing as a genre and part of contemporary theory has triggered a cross-cultural enlightenment which is experienced by a self-exiled intellectual (authors), who like nomadic travelers frame their travelogues within the frame of " reterritorialisation " and " deterritorialisation ". Today, travel writing is highlights the realities of postcolonial migrations, globalization as postmodern phenomena which creates multi-layered spatial-temporal contortion. The research aims to look at the historical and cultural vision of some travel writers and expound the filament of knowledge and power of exploration in travel writing studies.

On Writing the “Anti-Travel” Novel

Anomaly Magazine, 2018

Though it does make me giddy to see that the reader’s expectations of travel could be purged forth by reading my novel, and that some readers will feel unpleasantly forced to confront their own colonial perspectives, the great shame of all this speculation on “anti-travel” is that I only included the word in the novel’s subtitle as an after-thought. The word itself does not appear in the novel, nor in any of my blogs, essays, or academic work on travel. It was two years after first seeking publication for Stamped that my partner, who had watched me crumble apart after years of rejections, convinced me to call Stamped an “anti-travel” novel rather than a “punk-travel” novel or a “novel of the dejected.” So, since writers are somewhat expected to own the language we use, allow me to take a swing and spend this blog post caught in the gravity of this term. Just what exactly is “anti-travel”? I have the sense that it has something to do with 1) traveling as a queer mixed-race person of color, 2) inheriting self-destructive tendencies that have, in the past, bordered on suicidal, and 3) a mission to decolonize the spaces, histories and my own self-perceptions in any way I can. I hope to spend time reflecting on each of these points. A warning: I don’t want to give the impression that just because someone identifies as non-white or queer that they will inherently practice a sort of “anti-travel” wherever they go. Stamped is in a way about the tendency for anyone to parrot colonial attitudes when high on the travelesque trappings of whimsy and delight.

“The notions of home and abroad in travel writing.”

Any geographical movement implies a distance from home. Home represents the norm, the known and the habitual; it is the territory where everything looks familiar and inherent to the traveller’s understanding. Abroad, on the contrary, symbolizes the unusual, the foreign. It is through the experience of travel that the writer faces this distinction. In an unknown land, home may be envisioned as an idyllic surrounding; but leaving home behind may also be a liberating alternative that determines the traveller’s contentment. To explore the notions of home and abroad in travel writing would be the starting point of this essay. The space of belonging can be deconstructed and reshaped with every step the traveller takes on his route. Through assimilation and identification with the other, the concept of home is shattered: the familiar turns unfamiliar, abroad is no longer so foreign. The domestic setting does not necessarily imply a fixed location; though, as James Clifford states, “roots always precede routes”, the traveller may widen his earliest vision of home by considering any place he comes across in his path as a promising site for settlement. What, then, is the distinction between home and non-home? Where exactly is home at the end of the journey? To what extent are the notions of home and abroad opposite terms? These are essential queries to the genre, and some of their possible answers may be found in the literary records of many travel writers, from Mark Twain and Henry James to Bill Bryson and Jonathan Raban.

Itinerancy in Round-The-World Travel, an education in meeting the Other and the Self

This research aims to question the process of education during a round-the-world travel, marked by itinerancy and thus by non-integration with the cultures encountered. In this type of trip, immersion in depth would be achieved by remaining a foreigner, by accessing the intimate position of the guest through the rite of hospitality. The meeting thus considered would allow an opening to the "unspeakable" of the radical otherness of the other which, in hindsight, is used for emplotment through a reflexive linguistic return. This process appears to produce an emancipation vis-à-vis the sociocultural heritage of the traveller, fostering in him an understanding of his selfhood not as substance but as construct, through métissage (interbreeding- crossbreeding) with the other (Glissant 1997). Provided that it is located in the paradigm of lifelong learning, this type of recurring meeting in the course of an itinerant voyage would constitute a set of micro-liminalities that are productive of self-education (Galvani, 2006) and can lead to biographical turning points (Lesourd, 2009; Grossetti, Bessin, Bidart, 2009).