In any case, as we've discussed at length in class, your charge this week is to find your own critical text that theorizes travel from your particular academic background. After you find it, you'll read it carefully, succinctly summarize the argument and the main evidence used to support the argument (in 250 words or fewer), and then offer a short critical analysis of the argument (a paragraph at most), all of which you will post here in the comments. Sounds simple, but this should involve doing a bit of research, reading the abstracts and introductions to a bunch of essays, books, and/or book chapters. As you're doing this work, I'd highly recommend keeping a running list of the sources you've consulted--this can be as easy as cutting and pasting titles to an e-mail. I recommend this because I think you should think of this assignment as an opportunity to begin the process of researching your seminar paper. As an additional side project to keep in mind as you're doing your research: keep track of primary texts you think you'd like to read. As I mentioned in class, I'd originally scheduled a second "choose your own adventure" day in the class, hoping that students would bring in primary texts to write about (in particular texts that spoke back to the largely dominant culture, "traditional" travel texts we are critically engaging together). If our experiment in interdisciplinarity this week proves productive, then we could easily schedule a second one.
Finally, you should prepare to "sell" your particular primary source to class with a tightly organized 3-minute presentation (it's probably best if this doesn't involve technology, as it takes time to make it work, and time is of the essence, but if you want to sing, dance, or otherwise make this presentation exciting, then by all means... knock yourself out). My hope is that we'll not only have a cool interdisciplinary annotated bibliography of texts in the theory and criticism of travel posted in the comments here, but that the presentations will also remind us that we should be reading widely in the theory and criticism of travel for the entire semester and that these are potentially good places to start.
After the presentations, I'll ask us to come to some conclusions about the entirety of the presentation, and we'll try to find ways to put the work in conversation with our own goals and critical questions as they are developing in relation to travel.
Which is all to say: I'm really excited to see what y'all are finding and I'm especially looking forward to hearing about it next week.
Good luck, and, as always, feel free to contact me with questions, comments, anxieties, etc.
kevin
PS I leave you with another gem from the find folks at Bantam Books...
The article I selected is called “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” by Clifford Geertz. Geertz was studying the Balinese people and initially he found it incredibly difficult to interact with the people because as an outsider they ignored him. It was only during a raid on a cockfight, in which he and his wife ran with the rest of the locals that they were able to form a camaraderie, and he was able to begin his study of the people. His analysis of the people is focused on their practice of cockfights, which are not just about the fights but the people that are involved in the fight. Whereas, the government in Bali views the cockfights as “primitive” and “backward,” the Balinese people consider it a staple to their lifestyle. At one point, Geertz says, “the cocks are symbolic expressions or magnifications of their owner’s self, the narcissistic male ego writ out in Aesopian terms, they are also expressions- and rather more immediate ones – of what the Balinese regard as the direct inversion aesthetically, morally, and metaphysically, of human status: animality.”
ReplyDeleteWithin the fights, there is a unique and complicated manner of betting. There is the central bet that the referee oversees between the two participants of the fight, and there are the secondary peripheral bets between those watching. The interesting thing about the betting system was people will bet based on their relationship with those fighting not on the outcome of the fight itself. It is a show of solidarity and kinship. Geertz concludes that the cockfights are a means to fixing people into a hierarchical rank. Additionally, it is a “Balinese reading of a Balinese experience; a story they tell themselves about themselves.”
While at first it seems like this doesn’t fit the idea of travel writing because Geertz is talking about a people’s culture instead of his travel to this place, I believe some of the tropes are still present. For Geertz there was a switch, a moment when he “went native.” He ran from the police at a raid on a cockfight and because of that action, he was accepted into the community and able to do his research. This is an important thing to understand because he had to “give up” his beliefs on what would be right and view the culture from the eyes of the local. The problem that I have with Geertz is that he represents the Balinese cockfight as strictly Balinese. It is something unique to them whereas there are several places that participate in this as well. Additionally, Geertz has a very masculine view of the people and even says “Cockfighting is for those who are involved in the everyday politics of prestige as well, not for youth, women, subordinates, and so forth.” So there is a rather large bias on the side of the Balinese that the reader is given, and a rather large proportion of the population that is left out of the description. With that in mind, it is still an impressive and intriguing look into a culture that appears to be difficult to study because they regard outsiders as invisible.
Alexander von Humboldt was a German traveler who explored the Americas in the very early 1800s - producing volumes upon volumes of written work describing his experiences and findings. As a biogeographer, botanist, and zoologist, his works contained much in the way of natural science; however, he also weaved in branches of culture, society, and literature. In the critical essay, “Alexander von Humboldt: Revolutionizing Travel Literature,” Oliver Lubrich argues that Humboldt challenges classic travel writing on nearly all fronts. Firstly, the traveler is not an identifiable subject; first-person narration is hard to pin down and the identity of the speaker morphs and blurs among Humboldt himself, his travel group, his home country’s population, Europeans, and even humanity in general. Secondly, the object of travel also eschews definability; Humboldt uses an unusual linguistic formula to designate place and perceives area through multiple paradigms including geographical, climatic, historical, political/colonial, temporal, and perspectival. Humboldt’s audience is also atypical of the genre; at times (and sometimes at once) the text seems to be directed to the common reader, the scientific/academic community, patrons of the trip, the colonial administration, European settlers, the indigenous populations, and posterity. Lastly, the resultant text evades stylistic definition; it is a polyglot metatextual unfinished travel report, with so many additions, corrections, attachments, and footnotes it is impossible to read linearly. Why this is such profound travel writing, according to Lubrich, is because its “heterogeneity [can] be read as a strategy to keep foreign reality from appearing tangible” (379). Because after all, “what is foreign, strange, or ‘other’ cannot be clearly told, conceived, or described” (380).
ReplyDeleteThis breakdown of the genre is an interesting parallel to the building-up of the genre we’ve been doing in class discussions. Humboldt was very influential to many other travel/exploration/nature writers, and this essay presented some interesting questions on the feasibility of unifying science and literature, or how compatible narrating travel can be with presenting scientific results. As the study of how living things and living systems are distributed in geographic space and geologic time, biogeography seems to be closely connected with travel - linking together times and places.
Citation: Lubrich, Oliver. “Alexander von Humboldt: Revolutionizing Travel Literature.” Monatshefte 96.3 (2004): 360-387.
Jessika (Bambi) Caudy
ReplyDeleteSeptember 21, 2015
The reading I selected was The Social Psychology of Tourist Behavior by Philip L. Pearce. His book combines the research of sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and historians in an attempt to situate the practice of travel and tourism in its relative position of importance in today’s society. For the reading, I focused on what Pearce has gathered about the sociological psychology of travel and tourism.
Pearce introduces the Compensatory Leisure Hypothesis that states “people seek the opposite kinds of stimulation in their leisure environment to that of work” (Pearce 1982:20). When on vacation away from home, the traveler experiences a sense of bewilderment that allows them to mentally separate themselves from life at home. Although Pearce acknowledges that many tourists understand and see the fakeness of their surroundings while traveling, they use it to further their experience and “demonstrate his own perspicacity” by comparing their own authentic experiences to the inauthentic experiences of travel (Pearce 1982:18). This comparative acknowledgement of what is authentic improves a traveler’s “mental well-being” (Pearce 1982:18). Pearce cites MacCannell’s The Tourist when explaining that the act of traveling has replaced the need for meaning and authenticity that most find in religion (Pearce 1982:18). The act of travel then is an essential act that, according to Cohen and Taylor’s Escape Attempts, allows the “cultivating of one’s own consciousness” (Pearce 1982:18). Tourism allows a person to situate themselves in their own world by visiting another and gaining a perspective outside of that found in work and daily life.
While the review on the sociological psychology of travel was brief, I find it perfectly illustrates the relationship between place of travel and tourist. They both work together to create a sense of inauthenticity that enhance the other worldly experience of the traveler. The law of supply and demand dictates that when a demand is made for a fake but enamoring experience, a destination will supply the necessary falsified cultural aspects. The act of travel is nothing more than an act of validation that something outside of the day to day minutia of life exists and that somehow a traveler can be a part of it.
Pearce, P. L. (1982). Tourists, Tourism and Tourist Pyschology. The social psychology of tourist behavior (pp.1-26). New York: Pergamon Press Inc.
MacCannell, D. (1976). The tourist. New York: Schocken.
Cohen, S. and Taylor, L. (1976) Escape attempts. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
The article I chose is the introduction to the book “Metamorphoses of Travel Writing”: Across Theories, Genres, Centuries, and Literary Traditions”, a compilation of works edited by Grzegorz Moroz and Jolanta Szachelska.
ReplyDeleteSztachelska writes the introduction and begins by telling three short personal stories about her experience with the concept of travel. She uses them to illustrate the way that travel is made of many dimensions. From there, she explores the way travel “has remained a passion of mankind since dawn”, bringing up myths, legends, epics, and the theory that travel is an instinct. Sztachelska even calls it an “evolutional necessity”.
Next, she places travel/travel writing in a historical context and explores what happens to the genre as travel transcends its utilitarian purposes to the “travel mania” of the nineteenth century and the birth of mass tourism. She claims that “The inventions…simplified man’s travelling, but at the same time seperated it from poetry”. She classifies Romantic travel literature in categories such as “oriental, caused by necessity (forced exile), home travels, scientific, education in Europe (the Grand Tour)…”, focusing that these travels and writings had an end goal: to extend knowledge and reality of man.
Finally, she identifies models of travel writing: Homeric, in the character of Odysseus (focusing on the return), the modern model (her example is Don Juan: a traveler who “runs after passion…travelling for him means to be alive”), and the contemporary model, “connected with travelling in the enclosed space of the city, the mind, and the personality”.
Her final argument is that travel discourse is the root of many contemporary literary genres.
My short critical analysis is that she accomplishes the goal of introducing approaches to travel writing as a genre. She gives a history of the genre, ties it to other genres, and identifies models of writing and the way tropes have changed. However, I would have liked to see her back up her claim in the beginning that travel is “necessary” and that “travels and wanderings are…an absolute necessity of mankind”. I think she leans on the side of mystifying travel at some points and exaggerating, especially in the beginning.
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ReplyDeleteThe first sections of the book “A History of Travel in America” by Seymour Dunbar provide great insight into how early forms of travel in America evolved and the reasoning behind why travel did or didn’t grow during certain periods throughout history. One of his main points is that travel was first invented for humans to travel, and the focus was on speed and comfort. The creation of travel for the transport of commodities always followed second. I love the quote, “The pioneer, no matter of what date or locality, was always a traveler before he was a producer or shipper of goods” which accentuates the standard timeline of how travel methods evolve. According to Dunbar, a main theme present in the revolution of travel is the push of the masses. He talks about the birth of the American desire for speed and the increase in the value of an individual’s time. This drive spurred people on to conquer the wilderness in the colonial days. Dunbar observes that the greatest period of time for revolutionary ideas was the period between 1788-89 and 1868-69. These 80 years brought about most of the technology known when this book was written (1968), and the following 40 years were simply changes and improvements made to the first concepts and designs. Dunbar lastly discusses how the whole process could have been done better or faster had there been a leader to push the boundaries, but that the leaps in technology were drastic.
ReplyDeleteDunbar’s theories are very thought provoking, and the evidence he uses can be found in any history textbook. He writes that after the separation with the British and the Louisiana Purchase the mechanical power era began, and everything about the world began to be redesigned - there were no greater changes than of those in travel. His support for the timeline of growth is also very logical and shows why travel suddenly expanded in the period of 80 years he speaks of, but perhaps not as much in other times. I found the beginnings of this book very fascinating and look forward to reading more of it.
My disciplinary interests in English and creative writing led me to Jahan Ramazani’s article, “Traveling Poetry.” Ramazani analyzes poetry through a lens of travel theory influenced by Edward W. Said, James Clifford, and Mary Louise Pratt. Ramazani describes travel as a literal or imaginative cross-cultural interaction and explores the ways in which poets are able to “leap across national and cultural boundaries” (281-282) in their work. He analyzes poems from modern and contemporary writers, delving into works by Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Okot p’Bitek, just to name a few. Throughout this article, Ramazani considers how poems can be read as a kind of “contact zone,” and discusses the implications of exploring culture through lyric poetry. Ramazani sees each culture as “always already thoroughly enmeshed in a multitude of others” (291) and thus brings into question the logic of difference that is seen in the traditional Euroimperialistic travel writing. He puts forward this idea that travel poetry is well-suited to question these rigid boundaries of literary and global identities, because poetic form is more open to the intermingling of cultures through its ability to make metaphorical and lyrical connections.
ReplyDeleteI think Ramazani’s article brings traditional understandings of travel and travel writing into question, through his well-informed critique of literary form and analysis of our ways of knowing. Ramazani illustrates how the poetic form can be another way to approach travel and sense of place. I recognize that Ramazani may be biased and favor the poetic form over the essay in his own work, nevertheless this article gave me a new perspective and ideas to think about when I consider travel theory in the future. Ramazani’s article cited the book, "Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry" by Bonnie Costello. If I can get my hands on a copy of this text, I would like to continue exploring this poetic approach to travel writing.
In the BLA Interdisciplinary Studies program, my key focuses are English and art. I decided to try and find out how the physical arts affected travel writing, or at least how they influenced them. No such luck from three days of searching. I did however find an article by Judith Adler titled Travel as Performed Art. Adler takes a look (from a sociological standpoint) at travel being its own art form. She comments on writers commonly discussing the art of travel writing, but not often do they write about the act of traveling being the art. Adler goes on to note that the way that a type of people travel, can explain that group just as much as their physical appearance or their cultural beliefs do. Their dress, route, area of focus on a trip, transit route, and their accommodations can be finessed in to the “perfect trip,” much like a painter can finesse the acrylics on a canvas. Adler states that, “A body of travel performances may be comparable to a school of painting or to an artistic movement” (1372). The way a person travels can go on to inspire other people to travel in the same such way. The significant tropes noted in this piece are taken from that same sentiment. Travelers wish to experience a type of “time machine,” through their journey. They wish to go back in time to experience culture or they wish to travel to an impoverished country to experience hell. All these things go hand-in-hand to define the traveler.
ReplyDeleteShe really does a great job of using commonalities among cultures to describe the type of people traveling to a specified area. She mentions that people might want to take a trip to the holy land. She also mentions briefly about how gender plays in to traveling. The privilege aspect of male travel vs female travel was quite interesting.
Since I am a BLA major, I have two concentrations: Anthropology and Environmental Science. I decided to concentrate on my primary focus, Anthropology. Based on our past readings, it is evident that travel writing and anthropology are very tied together. So that is why I chose a critical analysis of anthropology and travel writing rather than finding another article about ethnography's or the like.
ReplyDelete"Anthropology and Travel: Practice and Text" by Ivona Grgurinovic. The article opens with a very interesting quote from Claude Levi-Strauss: "I hate traveling and explorers."Grgurinovic states that despite Levi-Strauss’s protests, “not even he could deny that anthropology and travel are intrinsically connected.” Grgurinovic states that the point of the article is to identify similarities and analogies between the travel writer and the anthropologist in regards to the practice and the textual product.
The biggest aspect in common is the most obvious, the travel writer and the anthropologist must travel in order to produce their work. Grgurinovic goes on to discuss the other factors in which travel writing and anthropology overlap. It is near the end of the article in which an interesting statement is made: “…In the literature on travel and travel writing there is a tendency to mythologize and fetishize travel, the reference points being mostly elite, individualist, Western recreational travel for pleasure, with frequent lamentations on how the tourist boom caused the degradation of ‘authentic’ travel and the frequent distinctions between the ‘true’ traveler and tourist-consumer.” This quote brings me back to the class discussions, about where the difference in travel writing and anthropologist’s work do lay. Travel writing does have a point of trying to entice the reader to the particular place while anthropologist’s work has a point of trying to capture a point in time for a place, trying to capture the culture of the area. If an anthropologist’s work happens to capture the reader and inspire them to travel to that certain area to have a similar experience, so be it, but that was not their original intention.
My primary emphasis in my BLA degree is psychology, with a secondary in English. For this assignment I read “The journey effect: how travel affects the experiences of mental health in-patient service-users and their families” by Heyman, Islam, Adey, Ramsay, Taffs, and the Xplore Service-User and Carer Research Group (2015). This was a qualitative study conducted in England with a total of 23 participants. In this study they were looking at how “travel” affects the experience of mental health service-users (patients) and carers (family or loved ones). The study was conducted by individual and group interviews with both service-users and carers. They interviewed people who had either a perceived “easy” travel to the mental health facility or a perceived “difficult” travel, as defined by length of travel and accessibility and availability of public transport. They found that the majority of service-users felt that travel to a mental health facility was detrimental to their experience in said facility, and isolated them from their wider lives and made their hospital stay more stressful, both because of the actual journey to arrive at the facility and the disconnect it created from loved ones, who were less likely or able to visit. A few participants welcomed the distance from their normal environment and relationships. Those with easier travel experiences still felt that the travel was detrimental to their overall experience, but less so than those with a more difficult travel experience. The most negative effect was seen with individuals who had some sort of physical disability and had a longer travel to the mental health facility. I found this research interesting because while it does not focus on typical “travel”, such as taking a trip somewhere, it is an aspect of travel that is very important and relevant to many people; traveling to access a service. While public transport is generally widely available in most of England, it is not necessarily convenient, or usable at all for people with a disability, or who suffer from severe anxiety, depression, or certain phobias.
ReplyDeleteBob Heyman, Elizabeth Lavender, Shahid Islam, Alvin Adey, Trevor Ramsay,
Neil Taffs & the Xplore Service-User and Carer Research Group (2015) The journey effect: how
travel affects the experiences of mental health in-patient service-users and their families,
Disability & Society, 30:6, 880-895, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2015.1030067
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is perhaps one of the most well-known creative travel (or perhaps road trip) novels. In The American Myth of the Wilderness in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Desolation Angels by Sören Schoppmeier. The article breaks down the inherent problems the Kerouac’s novels present in terms of the myth of America and pioneering it in the modern age. While we could argue the Kerouac isn’t traditionally travel writing, his thinly veiled as himself and Neal Cassady characters go through all the traditional symptoms of any travel essay as we’ve seen in class. Schoppmeier gives a rundown of three of Kerouac’s most famous novels and breaks down the ideas and myths that are presented to the readers. In the article we are also given a presentation of the problems with these myths and what they create in terms of American ‘myths,’ especially within post-World War II America. The myth of Wilderness is presented time and again within the characters.
ReplyDeleteSchoppmeier’s argument is essentially that Kerouac’s “Need to get out of traditional society and go west and into the modern wilderness of the American city turns into a dissatisfaction therewith, which finds an outlet in a turn to the traditional wilderness in nature, only to then transform into a renewed yearning for that same civilization,” (Schoppmeier 10). The books he brings into question are evidence enough, of the stages within the myth that the characters go through as the travel across American lands.
Schoppmeier is correct in his breakdown, in which Kerouac both builds up the American road trip, but also breaks it down. Schoppmeier understands that myths die out and then reform into new myths even within Kerouac’s work. The same could be said of how Kerouac presents ideas of people, in masculinity and the whiteness of his characters. As it never truly leaves the way he weaves words. The idea of wilderness, not typical wilderness, but city wilderness being a focal point to find oneself, is a common idea within some travel essays. The inherent idea that when one is displaced, epiphany will hit. Later within The Dharma Bums, we see American boys who present themselves as Buddhists ‘finding’ peace in the unknown quiet of wilderness, but also the destruction that comes from it in Desolation Angels. The article brings an interesting idea to the table of how wilderness in it many splendors allows for a reaffirmation of one’s self.
Schoppmeier, Sören. "The American Myth of the Wilderness in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Desolation Angels." New Academia Vol. III. Issue II (2014). Web. 19 Sept. 2015. .
I would like to start off by announcing that you are not alone, Kevin – I, too, read Choose Your Own Adventure books! There was a particularly exciting one about creating your own AI computer that I remember being my specific favorite.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to my own academic background, I’m doing the BLA program – Bachelor of Liberal Arts – with my major emphasis being in History and my minor in Creative Writing. At first I was worried that I would have a hard time finding a “critical text that theorizes travel” from those specific backgrounds, since I don’t particularly consider either of those fields of study to be very critical (unless it comes to editing, or checking the validity of sources). But then it occurred to me – who, in my experience of the creative writing field, is more critical than Mark “Fight Me” Twain? So I did some research, and found out that he wrote a book called The Innocents Abroad – which is, in all honesty, less of an actual book than it is a travel journal in book form. Sent on a cruise and tour, he makes several arguments about travel that seem remarkably similar to what we’ve been studying in class. However, his larger and overall argument seems to be that travel provides a lot of up-close insight into the behavior of our fellow human beings.
As evidence, he uses his interactions with both his fellow American travelers and the inhabitants of the European cities he visits. These interactions can (and do) include everything from his own observations of the “arrogant American tourist” as they visit different European cities and speak with one another on the ship, but also their interactions with Europeans – both the people who live there, and the officials who tell them what they can and can’t do, as well as enacting drastic policies like putting the ship on quarantine.
I think that The Innocents Abroad serves very well as a critical text on travel theory, because (for me at least) it bridges the gap between the serious travel writing in the anthology we read earlier in class, and the “guide to white people” satire that we read on the first day. Travel writing can be serious, and is certainly its own genre, but I think that in large part it leaves out some of the most honest parts about traveling – the often painful process of actual travel, for one thing, as well as the humor of how miserable some tourist destinations can be. Humor in general, really. We discussed in class how people almost seem to think that you haven’t “really traveled” unless something went wrong and you can complain about it later. But for me – and thankfully for Mark Twain – a large part of the complaint process is making the story of your pain funny, instead of just a long whine. I’m really looking forward to getting to know this book better, and hopefully using it in my final paper.
As a BLA program student I am involved in an interdisciplinary studies degree so I have two concentrations. My primary concentration is in English and my secondary concentration is in Communications. I came across a case study from the Journal of Teaching & Tourism that talked about students in study abroad programs. I found this read particularly interesting because it goes against what I have been learning so far in my communication studies. This case study focuses on a group of American students who were sent to Italy for a study abroad program. The argument made here is that the “lack of language fluency, under particular, well-identified conditions, does not inevitably create a barrier but may enhance visitors’ enjoyment and contribute to cross-cultural interactions” (105). I am reminded of my 8th grade Spanish course that I took which was based on the premise of immersion. The teacher, from day one, came into the classroom only speaking in Spanish. I was lost and immediately disengaged myself from the class. The students in this study abroad program were sent to a small town in Italy and given a routine. They did have an interpreter, but on occasion, would leave them on their own. The studies showed surprising evidence that the student’s actually felt more inspired to engage in conversation without the interpreter than when they had one. We studied intercultural communication in my Communication Theory course, and the main argument brought up was that there was a negative experience attached to each “immersion” scenario. One of my classmates said he went to Mexico and had the worst experience, because he couldn’t understand the language or culture, and also felt a bit turned off by the personal boundaries that they lack there. There is a sense of familial relations in this case study, where the Italian family that owned the restaurant they went to welcomed them and cooked their meals from scratch, and an older gentlemen name Armando, who spoke no English told them stories. A sense of camaraderie also took place in this case study. The American students felt alone when they first traveled to Italy, but then felt a sense of union to know that everyone was going through this experience for the first time together. In the end, this case study proved that the immersion of these inexperience students with Italy boasted positive outcome. None of the students felt that they had a terrible experience, and actually stated that it was, as cliché as it may sound, a life-changing experience.
ReplyDeleteIn Karen Connelly’s, “The First and Last Country: Some Notes on Writing and Living the Foreign,” the relationship of duality between the body and mind, as it pertains to language, and the desire to make known the foreign are the main focuses of the first half of the piece. The second half focuses on Connelly’s experiences in foreign places, particularly escaping negative experiences at home to dive into war-torn or impoverished countries. Her conclusion rests in empathy - what she believes became the most important code for her writing, that she, “contribute to the history of kindness (p. 202).” This article, as a whole, is primarily a reflection on writing development, but can also be looked at as a guide to travel writing.
ReplyDeleteConnelly is a poet, first and foremost. She finds that, “Poetry remains…the most emotional and immediate response to lived experience (p. 198).” In writing, travel writing in particular, the desire to become familiar with the foreign, are at the base of an artist. Connelly states, “The origins of this desire are complex, and in part remain inexplicable, which, for the artist, is necessary (p. 198).” This is a common trope we have been discussing on class, the “discovery”. However, Connelly writes, “A country is, as much as anything, a state of mind. If we are to have a profound and truthful experience of place, the mind must be open, must be vulnerable, must be spacious enough to accommodate a violent invasion of the other (p. 201).” She then goes into giving her history, her need to escape a bad home life, only to be forced into the realization that all other people are suffering, in one form or another. Her conclusion, after speaking about her time on the war-torn Thai-Burma border in the 1990’s, is the importance of respecting the individual’s story. “It is a very complicated, politically and practically fraught, question, and part of my work is to just keep trying to respond (p. 202).”
This article mattered to me, because I am a writer and a traveler. In beginning to explore travel writing more in depth in this class, I have begun to see a commonality within the genre – that is the “been there, done that” mentality. I came, I saw, I conquered – I brought back some sort of story to tell (whether journalistically, memoir-oriented, etc.). The reason why I find Connelly’s arguments important, is that they serve as a reminder that, as writers, we need to hold reverence in the individuals’ stories because, “To be entrusted with a story, is to be entrusted with a life (p. 202).”
I had a hard time finding a critical piece related to my interests, but there is a plethora of articles written from first hand perspectives of travel highlighting the things that inspire me. I am a marine biology major, but my interests are not strictly tied to just living things in the ocean. For one I love to sail and have plans to incorporate sailing into my life no mater what I end up doing. I also have strong feelings toward the way we treat the world; specifically the way we treat the oceans. Because of these interests of mine I choose two articles (they were both pretty short).
ReplyDeleteThe first of these, Sea Pilgrim by Andy Schell, tells the story of a nonprofit called the Ocean Research Project. A man named Matt Rutherford started this organization after realizing that he wanted to put his passion for sailing to use in society. Along with his partner and scientist Nicole Trenholm, Matt sails the oceans and collects data that can be used to look at current ocean conditions and climate change. He took his love for traveling the world’s oceans and combined it with an urge to keep the oceans travelable. There is a term in biology called biomagnifications. This is were a substance is consumed by organisms low in the food chain are magnified as these smaller organisms are eaten by larger organisms and then those are in term eaten by larger organisms. It can be a big problem in ecosystems and is a pig problem with trash in the oceans. We end up easting our own waste basically. If this idea is applied to travel writing it creates kind of a cool way of viewing the effects of travel writing. As we have discussed small ideas created through travel writing can define cultures. The ideas that one individual has about there travel experience can be magnified through levels of communication to the point that a whole culture is defined by their experience.
The second article I decided to talk about was “Out Life On The Water” by Diane Selkirk. It is a very personal account of how Diane and her husband chose to continue their life of sailing even after starting a family. They left there house on solid ground when there daughter was 9 and set sail as a family. What I took away from these two articles is how vast the options that travel writing creates are. There is a way to incorporate the sharing of experience to influence society and community with any field or dream. Whether you use travel to find new insight on a changing world or to escape the “normal” way of life to find new forms of educating a child, travel writing opens up the possibility of infinite doors to open.
Schell, Andy. "Sea Pilgrim." Sail 46.5 (2015): 44-47. Readers' Guide Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson). Web. 22 Sept. 2015.
SELKIRK, DIANE. "Our Life On The Water." Saturday Evening Post 287.2 (2015): 36. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 22 Sept. 2015.
For our disciplinary readings, Paul Carter’s book The Road to Botany Bay analyzes the geographical development of Colonial Australia, presenting travel and travel writing both from colonial roots and imperial agendas, as well as bringing indigenous sensibilities of travel which are inexpressible in a western literary tradition.
ReplyDeleteCarter argues that (white) “history has a historical horizon which is constituted by the act of history itself: the history of writing.” He states that “The fact that history is essentially an act of interpretation, a re-reading of documents, means that it hides our origins from us. For by its nature, history excludes all that is not quoted or written down. Only what has been transcribed is available for interpretation” (Carter 326). The downfall of dominant history (which we have received through writing, travel writing specifically), is that our access to it is merely the relation to another persons interpretation of space and time.
Carter argues for a description of phenomenological exploration (which I would argue can be equated to travel writing) in the journals of some of the explorers which invokes a dialectic of imagination and intentionality; this is to say, the act of exploring (that is travel) is a process of engaging and interpreting space in a way that is not merely the influx of stimuli, but rather is the relation of space with the explorer’s (traveler’s) own preconceived sensibilities. Carter describes an intentional state of mind as “neither a blank page passively waiting to be written on by events, nor a storehouse of associations incapable of judging novelty except by the light of associations incapable of judging novelty except by the light of custom and previous experience” (Carter 324). I would not argue that this dialectical modality of perception is wrong or necessarily bad, but rather, that it is merely the one which western culture has become rooted in; it is founded completely in language, the written word, and the act of naming, and this is what travel writing has developed from, beginning from its colonial roots.
The detriment of this sensibility is that only in naming and writing are events and spaces given legitimacy in history. The indigenous peoples of Australia did not practice linguistic history, and in the act of naming and writing Aborigines and Aborigine traditions and spaces within a white history, the entire cultural practice was estranged and kept its meanings hidden. The conclusion is that a white historical discourse or documentation cannot preserve or express an indigenous history.
What is necessary to theorize is two ideologically different modalities of travel; one which spurs from a linguistic history, and a second from a spacial history. Carter writes that for the Aborigines’ “to describe a country is not to stand back, as if one were not there, but to travel in it again. For Aborigines, to travel a country is to tell it, to represent it to oneself... History is not a form of writing, a linear archive manufactured after the event. Instead history and the making of history are one and the same thing” (Carter 346). This kind of history, a spacial history, is one that does not neglect meanings that are marginalized by a one culture, but rather is one that is carried out through the vary act of cultural practice, and its profound connection to space allots the opportunity for the analysis of marginalized other cultures and cultural histories within our own current dominant history.
For this Choose Your Own Adventure experiment I was torn between two ideas: First, I wanted to take a look at one of the more recent Norton Anthologies of Poetry and through the lens of travel via western colonialism, find what they’ve missed and come up with what I think would be a better representation of the world of poetry. While this thought translates well with my discipline, the idea of travel is not as present as I would have hoped. My second therefore is what I will carry on and it is this; Reading Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts we meet modern family man and local University of Chicago professor of American History, William Dodd. Dodd is a “normal” guy with a little hobby farm on the east coast, two great kids in their early twenties, and a lovely wife. His suburban dream life is jostled a bit however when in the fall of 1933 he gets a call from President Roosevelt asking him to be the US ambassador to Germany at the start of Hitler’s Nazi regime. He is asked to pack his bags and family and head over to Berlin to begin working with the newly formed Socialist-Nationalist party and address if he could “the growing concern regarding the treatment of US Jews in the new Germany.”
ReplyDeleteApplying the theories and tenants set out in both the texts we have read thus far as well as the discussions we have had in class regarding travel to this literary work will yield new insight into compulsory travel and how the literature that follows differs from that of recreational travel. However, different as the fruits of each experience may be, can we not find merit in their commonalities as well as perhaps a richer definition of travel writing in their differences? This is what I seek to discover, the difference between travel writing that comes from recreational travel and that which comes from “forced” or coerced travel. Finding the difference between the two is exciting enough but applying the tropes of travel writing to this true story set in pre-war ramp up of Hitler’s Nazi Germany will be invigorating! Thoughts?
Book: Being and Place among the Tlingit
ReplyDeleteThomas F. Thornton
Travel writing, so far, is a discipline of using the personal to shed light on an unfamiliar place, culture, or people. We write to understand ourselves as much as to understand others. Would it not be perfect, then, to look towards a culture in which travel and a sense of place are indivisible from the person? In Being and Place among the Tlingit, Thomas Thornton examines the Tlingit, Lingit Aani, and how a complex and varied relationship between the two provide overlapping webs of meaning and identity for both. Compared to the traditional western practice, in which the environment is an adversary to overcome and place names are simply tags for reference, Thornton argues that for the Tlingit, concepts of place and cultural systems are one and the same.
So far, travel writing seems to attempt to develop a similar concept without naming it. Some writers attempt to weave their own narrative onto an unfamiliar landscape. Others, it feels, are content with documenting and cataloguing what is already there. So far, the results have been unsatisfying for me. The Why that drives travel writing has been vague and varied. To bring in a way of seeing and relating to landscapes both local and distant that does not follow the established pattern seems worth the time. I don’t yet know exactly how the two would intermesh, but I’m ready to see some writing that isn’t “playing tourist,” so to speak. I would like to rethink travel writing as something more entrenched and with the writer having higher stakes in the landscape.
I am a BLA student and my primary concentration is Psychology. I decided to find a journal article related to travel since the primary reading I do within my discipline comes from scholarly articles. I chose “Working Life on the Move, Domestic Life at a Standstill? Work-related Travel and Responsibility for Home and Family” by Gunilla Bergstrom Casinowsky.
ReplyDeleteCasinowsky used survey data from participants in Sweden to explore correlations between work-related travel and gendered division of labor in the home. They were interested in whether more frequent traveling outside the home for business changed the way couples distributed their household responsibilities. They studied this by asking the participants about the number of nights a year they and their partner spend away from home for work. They also asked whether they or their partner are responsible for the bulk of the housework, or if they share responsibilities equally.
They found that when men traveled for work there was a more unequal division of labor, with their female partner being more responsible for the domestic duties than when men did not travel for work. This difference was not shown when women traveled. Women that commuted at least 30 minutes a day were more likely to take on more of the household duties but this was not shown for men who commute. This research is correlation l and does not show cause and effect but shows some interesting findings related to the concept of travel and the implications that travel may have on relationships and home dynamics.
Geography as my major, “where is American Literature” by Caroline Lavander, fits the requirements, but where and what is American literature. Is it the material read by Americans, does it matter where it is written or the author’s nationality? Could it be American “by virtue of the fact of its having uptake in America and therefore of being embedded in American culture or what do we make of locations that currently are or have at one time been nominally American – spaces like Panama, Guam, Liberia, or the green zone in Baghdad? If John McCain, born in Panama, was American enough to run for President, is all Panamanian literature “American” in some way? Conversely, if President Obama’s birthplace of Hawaii has caused some to wonder how “truly American” he is, then, by extension, do these same presidential detractors disclaim the “American-ness” of literature written in, by, or about Hawaii” (Lavander)
ReplyDeleteAmerican literature can be found with all the cultural influences that make up the American population. These cultural differences tend to blend much together French, Spanish, Latino, and Asian into a big melting pot, like the population of the United States. The exploration of American literature presented in the book also reflects of the built environment as a place for people to gather and share literature. American literature seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
While my area of study is currently English with an emphasis on Literature, I am also pursuing a Spanish Minor. Linguistics has always had a certain fascination for me, so I tried to find an article that specifically dealt with linguistics as it relates to writing about travel. Many of the pieces I came across had to do with travel writing only peripherally, as linguistics by nature has to do with different countries. Still, I did turn up some interesting works.
ReplyDeleteOne of these was“Linguistic Material in David Thomas' 'Travels through the Western Country.'”A.M. Drummond writes this critical article about the linguistic aspects of David Thomas’ 1819 account of his journeys through the Western Indiana area. Drummond makes a point to analyze the special care that Thomas took to respect the variations of language and colloquialisms in that area. He includes, for example, a myriad of details about pronunciation, along with spelling and other salient details.
Drummond also highlights the mentions of different cultural mannerisms, such as the use of profanity. That is, Thomas had indicated that vulgar language was far more commonplace and blasé in the more Western parts than it was in the area of New York from which he came. His argument states essentially that the work and observations by David Thomas provide indispensable insight into the linguistic character of that area in the early 19th century. By extension, he also indicates that the value of travel and experiencing a place in the pursuit of linguistic knowledge cannot be understated.