BORDERS OF THE EXOTIC IN SVEN HEDIN’S MY LIFE AS AN EXPLORER THE TRAVEL MEMOIR OF AN AVANT-GARDE SCANDINAVIAN SELF-DISPLACED

Abstract

However repudiated or obsolete the category of exotism has come to be when dealing with travel literature, the psychological borders of the exotic, the voice of the unknown or “the call” of the exotic remains a topic deserving attention and inviting research. Since travel literature supposes different forms of re-reading, which in its turn involves different levels of self-awareness, and much of the interest travel memoirs generate relies on mapping the mindset of the travelling writer, my article targets the awareness about this “call” of the exotic sedimented in Sven Hedin’s famous travel memoir My Life as an Explorer. It is a book intended to play the part of the bridge between 19th and 20 century travel literature in a larger project whose focus lies on questions related to self-awareness and motivation with 20th century Scandinavian writers of travel literature, in an attempt to identify the presence of a “self-displacement” dimension in their approach to travelling and to using the encounter of alterity for constructing cultural landscape in their memoirs.