In analyses that continue to dominate the field today, travel writing is framed as one of many possible textualizations of the places visited by their authors. These textualizations are suspended in rhetorical tension or conflict with other forms of textual rendering, and the agents behind them tend to retain the status of Roland Barthes’ historical “scriptors.” The growing relevance of travel writing as a subject for philological reflection seems to stem, however, from several other cognitive impulses. (...)
Modernism, empire and the “Voyage In”
Anna Snaith
We publish Polish translation of the fragment of Anna Snaith’s Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945, Cambridge University Press 2014, pp. 15-28.
Three Variations on the Road to the Far East: On Strategies for Generating Cultural Difference in Polish Travel Writing from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
As a branch of writing, travel literature poses a range of hurdles to any attempts at theoretical, methodological, genealogical or poetic classification. In a canonical reference book for philologists in Poland, Dictionary of Literary Terms (Słownik terminów literackich), Janusz Sławiński defers to the broadest possible definition for the genre, arguing that travel literature operates between two poles: that which is “fully factual” sits on one end of the spectrum, while on the other, we find contrived travel tales both realistic and fantastical. (...)
Tagi: Anna Kołos, winter/spring 2018A Vertical Schema of Experience: Travel Writing from the Himalayas (Jerzy Kukuczka, Adam Bielecki)
One could argue that any exploration of the experience of travel, the sense of the world captured in transit and the intellectual tools used to conceptualize the traversed (absorbed, consumed, etc.) space (geographically, physically and culturally) must be foregrounded by first identifying the basic obstacles to articulating the nuances of travel and its literary and textual counterparts. (...)
Tagi: Przemysław Kaliszuk, winter/spring 2018