The cosmopolitan gaze: rearticulations of modern subjectivity

Abstract

I was reminded of the damage that liberals can do Graham Greene Graham Greene is a symbolic figure for contemporary travel writers. As one of the first modern writers to publish both novels and travelogues, he serves as a model for ‘cross-over’ authors like Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban and Pico Iyer. Many of Greene's novels are infused with exotic myths: for example, The Quiet American is a story about love, loss and moral action which is brought into relief by its setting in pre-war Vietnam. Greene also translates larger moral questions through an exotic lens in his travelogues – in Liberia he thinks of lost innocence ( Journey without Maps , 1936) and in Mexico he thinks of faith and violence ( The Lawless Roads , 1939). Greene's travelogues are certainly significant for their exotic registers, but they also inaugurate a new era of introspection for the travel writer. Countering Todorov's claim that modern travelogues record the ‘fleeting’ impressions of authors, Greene's writing suggests that travel writers are profoundly self-reflexive. As Blanton suggests, Greene's travelogues are ‘the real beginning of heightened subjectivity in the genre’ – a subjectivity which resonates deeply when posed against exotic, foreign and often hostile locations. This chapter examines the condition of self-reflexivity in contemporary travel writing and asks how it shapes the cross-cultural encounters between travel writers and those they write about.