Notion Of Travel Research Articles

Factors associated with COVID-19 in children aged 0 to 15 in Niger, 2020.

On January 30, 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a global health emergency. Children were affected in less severe forms. Niger had implemented measures in a context where children were a source of contamination. The aim was to determine the factors associated with COVID-19 in children in Niger from February to August 2020 through an analysis of the national database. We conducted an analytical cross-sectional study including all COVID-19 suspects in the database. We used Excel and Epi Info 7.2.4. software for data extraction and analysis. Frequencies and proportions were calculated, and in a logistic regression, we estimated the ORs of association with their 95% confidence intervals, the factors associated with COVID-19 at the threshold of p<0.05. Of 572 notified cases of suspected COVID-19 in children aged 0-15, 11.36% were positive. The median age of infected children was 10 years [IQR: 5- 13 years]. The male/female sex ratio was 2.1. Children aged 11 to 15 accounted for 49.2%, 61.5% lived in Niamey, 4.6% had comorbidities. The notion of travel was 12.3% and 40% had a notion of contact, 24.4% had a fever, 23.2% had a cough, 18% were hospitalized, and a case-fatality rate of 1.5%. In etiological analysis, the factors associated with COVID-19 were sex ORa=0.51 [0.28-0.93] p=0.028, presence of symptoms ORa=2.29 [1.23-4.25] p=0.008 and notion of contact ORa=0.32 [0.13-0.77] p=0.011. Exposed children were sensitive to COVID-19, and all age groups were affected, with a predominance of males. We recommend barrier measures adapted to young people, and early detection and management of infected children.

Contribution of hematology analyzers (Sysmex XN-Series) in the rapid diagnosis of malaria: case reports

Malaria is a potentially severe disease, particularly in Africa. In Europe, the majority of malaria cases come from travelers returning from endemic areas. The non-specific symptomatology may not alert the clinician if this notion of travel is not addressed. However, diagnosis and rapid initiation of treatment prevent the evolution of severe forms of the disease, especially in the case of Plasmodium falciparum infection, which can be life-threatening within 24 hours. Thin and thick blood smears microscopy is the main tools for diagnosis, but some automated hematology analyzers have demonstrated their ability to participate in early diagnosis. We describe two cases illustrating the contribution of the Sysmex XN-9100 automated system for the diagnosis of malaria. The first clinical case described a young man infected with numerous Plasmodium falciparum gametocytes. WNR (white blood cell count) and WDF (white blood cell differenciation) scattergrams showed an additional population, corresponding to gametocytes. The second case focused on a man with neuromalaria and high Plasmodium falciparum parasitaemia. Parasitized red blood cells form an inconspicuous double population on the reticulocyte scattergram, located at the discrimination limit between mature red blood cells and reticulocytes. Scattergram abnormalities, which can be visualized in a few minutes, offer an anticipation of the diagnosis of malaria in comparison to thin and thick smears microscopy, that requiring considerable time and expertise.

From endnotes to the ends of the earth: Moore, Staël, and romantic transport

ABSTRACT Scholarship on travel writing tends to focus on accounts by writers who spent time in the places they depict. But neither Romantic-era nor twenty-first-century cognitive theory gives such a limited notion of travel. Lalla Rookh (1817), a hybrid poetic text by Irish writer Thomas Moore, presents the idea that reading is a form of travel that provides access to distant places. Moore had never been to the lands – India, Egypt, Persia – about which he wrote, but rather constructed his text through meticulous research. In both Lalla Rookh’s text and paratext Moore makes the Orientalist argument that his research gave him the same experience of the East as one who had seen it first-hand. Through readings of Lalla Rookh and Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy, this essay argues that “travel” studies might benefit from the more capacious notion of “transport” as a disciplinary and conceptual category.

A importância da viagem: uma correspondência poética entre poetas e caraíbas

Este trabalho se dispôs a interpretar as longas peregrinações realizadas pelos tupis-guaranis de modo a estabelecer relação com uma noção de viagem que é muito cara à linguagem poética, aliás, própria do estatuto do poeta, ou seja, daquele que se lança no fazer poético; assim como a imagem ascética e errante do caraíba, enquanto designação também do poeta. Deste modo, pensar nesta correspondência entre o ritual indígena em busca de um território sagrado para refletir no próprio expediente poético, e em como ambos dialogam, ao entenderem, cada um à sua maneira, a importância da viagem, de sua trajetória e errância, mas também da figura do profeta-poeta, ou seja, daquele que se dispõe obstinada e religiosamente, no sentido da busca pelo sagrado, nesta perquirição. Para estabelecer tal correspondência, usaremos a trajetória poética de Max Martins, pois ele incorporou tais aspectos. Entre os teóricos que direcionaram este trabalho estão Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, Benedito Nunes, Edmond Jabès, entre outros.

Postcolonial flânerie in Caryl Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound and Ferdinand Dennis’s Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain

ABSTRACTThis article explores how Caryl Phillips and Ferdinand Dennis embody the contested figure of the postcolonial flâneur in their travel narratives. Movement is integral to the practice of flânerie, and therefore the figure has close associations with the notion of travel. Despite this, the figure has been largely neglected in travel writing studies as scholarship has chiefly focused on the depiction of the flâneur in fiction. As black travel writers moving through British cities, Dennis and Phillips offer fresh and ex-centric perspectives of urban space in their travel literature. Both authors contest the dominant and often univocal representations of these places by foregrounding their forgotten histories, by platforming marginalized voices, and by revealing how black urban wanderers and residents experience, read and traverse city space in a different way to their white counterparts.

Travelling cultures: religion, travel, and subjectivity in V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers and William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives

ABSTRACTThis article examines V.S. Naipaul's Among the Believers (1981) and William Dalrymple's Nine Lives (2009) as texts that interrogate the metropolitan subjectivity of the traveller who arrives at sacred sites from a discursive grounding in secular modernity and whose rationalist, post-Enlightenment notion of travel as observation, empirical experience and knowledge, embedded in a conception of physical space as a tangible, homogeneous entity, enters into an interpretive struggle with travel as associated with a set of metaphysical ideas and identity practices which formulate the itinerary act as austerity, penance, subversion, transformation and social protest. Using Emmanuel Levinas's idea of the ethical encounter, Judith Butler's concept of primary vulnerability, and Michael Taussig's idea of mimesis, this essay explores how travel in conjunction with non-secular epistemes and praxes reconfigures culture, agency, selfhood, and power outside the rubric of modernity and liberal individualism.

Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic ed. by Jo Ann Cavallo

Reviewed by: Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic ed. by Jo Ann Cavallo Gloria Allaire jo ann cavallo, ed., Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic. Options for Teaching, vol. 44. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2018. Pp. x, 382. isbn: 978–1–60329–383–9 (cloth), 978–1–60329–366–2 (paper). $45 (cloth), $29 (paper). [End Page 106] This is an ambitious collection of essays, forty-fourth in the MLA series for teaching specific texts or genres. The volume consists of thirty essays, grouped thematically, plus an introduction, summary of resources, and lengthy bibliography. Chapter topics include Franco-Italian and Italian medieval antecedents (Leslie Zarker Morgan, Maria Bendinelli Predelli); early editions (Giovanna Rizzarelli); readily available modern editions, English translations, and other resources (Marco Dorigatti, Joshua Reid, Jo Ann Cavallo); international reception of the three ‘Ferrarese Crowns’—Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso (Charles S. Ross, Phillip John Usher, Patricia E. Grieve); other Renaissance Italian authors of romance epic, such as Pulci and Folengo (Andrea Moudarres, Stefano Gulizia); and reworked and original epics by sixteenth-century Italian women poets (Julia L. Hairston, John C. McLucas, Julia M. Kisacky, Maria Galli Stampino). Contributors bring their specialized interests to bear on the genre and offer diverse pedagogical approaches. Gael Montgomery traces the transformation of Angelica from Boiardo’s incomplete poem to Ariosto’s continuation. Walter Stephens and Bryan Brazeau focus on specific Renaissance topoi (magic, monsters, the Earthly Paradise). Janet Levarie Smarr considers Orlando furioso under the rubric of ‘Madness in Renaissance Drama’ (pp. 118–27). Karina F. Attar offers a fine survey of Italian literary representations of Muslims. Moving beyond pure literature, several essays survey this genre’s impact on the visual arts (Chris Picicci, Morten Steen Hansen); madrigals (Grant Herreid, Barbara Russano Hanning); theater and performance (Evelyn Birge Vitz, Roberto Puggioni); modern retellings and comics (Stefano Nicosia); and even gaming theory in a course for non-literature majors (Andrea Privitera). Among such a crowded field of essays, some unevenness is inevitable. Contributors include scholars of all ranks, from ABD and lecturers to distinguished professors and emeriti. Contributions range in length from six to fifteen pages. Essays also vary in their use of endnotes. Some helpfully offer detailed content notes (Stephens, Levarie Smarr, Galli Stampino) or suggest readings and available sources (Zarker Morgan, Picicci), whereas other essays have only a single note or none at all. The Hansen article dedicated to visual arts would have benefitted from weblinks to images discussed, especially since many of this book’s readers will not be art historians. Similarly, the Herreid piece includes musical examples in score form, which may be incomprehensible to many instructors of literature, but only one CD is noted. There are several recordings of Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, if not of the other madrigals discussed. By contrast, Hanning’s excellent musicological essay provides lyrics only, without musical transcription, and then glosses the details of text setting in layperson’s terms. Space does not permit detailed discussion of each contribution, but I would like to mention two that are strikingly original. Susan Gaylard employs materiality theory to analyze the role of ‘status objects’ (armor, swords, clothing) and performance in the construction of knightly identity. The strategies informed by the humanistic education of the nobleman and adopted by historical Italian Renaissance courts—notably idealized by Castiglione—are critiqued by Ariosto: ‘The Furioso’s continual emphasis on the representation of identity and status through material objects throws [End Page 107] into relief Ruggiero’s failed education as a worthy knight . . . which is framed through the impossibility of reading appearances’ (pp. 131–2). Gaylard extends her analysis to the literal ‘materiality of the poem’s early editions’ [which offer] ‘further insights into the representation and questioning of political power’ (p. 132). An equally provocative chapter by Stephen P. McCormick considers the notion of travel as depicted by Italian authors from Marco Polo to Boiardo and Ariosto. He acknowledges the expanding awareness of lands beyond the Mediterranean as a result of historical mercantilism. His essay furnishes ‘key examples of cartographic production between roughly 1350 and 1540’ as analogues which illuminate ‘many of the geographic references in Italian epic and provide a powerful visual...

A Fraudulent Truth? Christian Damberger’s Vision of Africa (1801)

Two years after the publication of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799), the claim by a German cabinet maker/joiner, Christian Friedrich Damberger, to have crossed the African continent on foot over a period of 16 years, from the Cape of Good Hope to Morocco, made for an instant bestseller. After the narrative was unmasked as a hoax, however, critical reception was particularly vitriolic in Britain. This article analyses the reviews in order to determine why the hoax caused such outrage. It emerges that this narrative presents a direct challenge to Banksian notions of travel writing. Furthermore, its portrayal of Africa and its peoples tends to subvert contemporary attitudes concerning inter-racial relationships, the idea of ‘going native’, and, importantly, the slave trade. The article then asks what type of truth the narrative might be generating, if not a strictly factual one.

Post-modern Nomads or Post-Travellers? The Notion of Travel in Polish Novels of the Early 21st Century: Olga Tokarczuk, Andrzej Stasiuk, Joanna Bator

L’article propose d’analyser sur l’exemple des trois prosateurs polonais et leurs livres ecrits au debut du xxie siecle (Olga Tokarczuk, Les Peregrins, 2007 ; Andrzej Stasiuk, L’Orient, 2014 ; Joanna Bator, L’Ile Larme, 2015) la posture du touriste et la vision du voyage comme mode de vie des hommes post-modernes. Se fondant sur la reflexion de Zygmunt Bauman contenue dans son livre Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York University Press, 1997), nous proposons de reflechir sur le but du voyage, avec un rapport particulier au lieu et au temps, ainsi que sur l’idee que les voyages d’aujourd’hui ont necessairement un caractere de deplacement sur les traces des voyageurs d’autrefois, ils laissent une empreinte, qui passe par le corps, un element indispensable pour declencher l’ecriture et le travail de la memoire pour les trois ecrivains etudies.

Abroad

“Abroad” once evoked a feeling of returning to one's homeland or, in the case of post-war Australians, to the mother country. It was also synonymous with a distant journey or place in a foreign land. Today the expression “travelling abroad” infers notions of travel and adventure. The modern use of the word is more likely to be something fixed, or the undertaking of a meaningful activity, such as volunteering abroad or studying abroad. “Abroad” is also used in the context of charitable organisations such as Community Aid Abroad, Work Abroad and Projects Abroad. Rumours, too, can be “abroad” as they too travel widely, in and out in the open and in circulation. Further, a general sense of the care-free, of independence, excitement, imagination, endless possibilities and freedom is aroused. The modern sense of the word “abroad”—out of one's country or overseas—derives from its late fourteenth century meaning: “out of doors or away from home”. “Abroad” comes from the Old English word “on brede” meaning: “at wide.” This issue of M/C Journal presents a diverse and fascinating interpretation of the word “abroad”. Our feature article, “Mobility, Modernity and Abroad” by Alana Harris, provides an overview of Australian travel abroad and examines the ways in which modern tourists can be both at home and abroad at the same time. Following on from this, Marjorie Kibby, in “Monument Valley, Instagram and the Closed Circle of Representation,” discusses the use of Instagram and how tourists represent themselves in the photographs taken when they travel. In the traditional sense of the word “abroad”, Graeme Williams examines the way in which Gentlemen’s Art clubs in England influenced Australian artists who travelled there in the first decades of the twentieth century in “Australian Artists Abroad.” Jillian Adams examines the writings of Australian journalist Helen Seager during her assignment in London in 1950, and Gwen Hughes’s unpublished manuscript Balkan Fever, written about her observations during a trip there in the 1930s. Donna Lee Brien discusses the impact of international foods on Australians via a little known publication in Melbourne, Australia between 1956 and 1960; and Katie Ellis, Mike Kent and Kathryn Locke examine the positive impact of advocacy abroad on the way in which disabled people watch television in Australia. Patrick West proposes a new methodology for language and knowledge relations in his article on the way glossaries of indigenous words are presented in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby. Liz Davis explores the game Bayonetta and the way in which Bayonetta, the game’s main character, moves freely through both time and territory; whilst Jasleen Kaur fixes iconic brand Tiffany’s with the allure of New York and Lanlan Kuang invites us to engage with present day imaginings of journeys along the Silk Road through dance drama performances sponsored by the Chinese state to encourage its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s.The articles in this edition of M/C Journal take a word with old associations of journeys and travel, and add modern associations and ways of using the word “abroad”.

Writing travel in the Anthropocene: disastrous life at the end of the Arctic

Travel writers have been proclaiming the end of travel for at least a century and a half. Yet the global age of the twenty-first century presents us with a range of problems that challenge the notion of travel in ways that neither travellers nor travel writers could have imagined a century ago. Globalisation, increased mobility and rapid developments in digital media and other communication technologies have all made the previously “exotic” and “faraway” accessible to the degree that such terms have been hollowed out almost entirely. In addition, we now seem to be living in the Anthropocene: an age in which nowhere is left untouched by the activities of humankind. This article will offer a short overview of the manner in which the notion of travel has been contested by a rapid increase in the mobility of people, goods and information, concentrating on the Arctic as a case study for the impact of the Anthropocene and looking at a range of early twentieth-century Arctic travelogues and comparing them with their contemporary counterparts.

The absence of authenticity and the authenticity of absence in Robert Dessaix's Twilight of Love

This paper examines Robert Dessaix's tourist experiences in his fifth book-length publication Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004). Drawing on tourism theorists John Urry and John Frow, I suggest that Dessaix's travel experience shifts between the self-conscious coolness of the post-tourist and an unselfconscious, humanist quest for authenticity. I analyse these shifts in terms of Ning Wang's concept of “existential authenticity” which he differentiates from objectivist, constructivist and post-modernist approaches to authenticity. Dessaix essentially engages with, or moves playfully between, each of these modes. Ultimately, though, they dovetail at Courtavenel, France, when he visits one of Turgenev's former dwellings, revealing an essential sense of absence at the centre of Dessaix's identity, one that speaks to his absent biological parents, his lack of a concrete genealogy, the silence that surrounded his homosexuality in the first part of his life, and the threat of mortality that permeates Dessaix's work and his efforts to engage with his “true self”. In this way, Dessaix's travel experience not only characterises his journey as a quest for existential authenticity, but it also confirms Judith Adler's notion of travel as an artform that is capable of articulating subjectivity.

Drum Travel: Ensemble Drumming Traditions on Kikaijima—Cultures, Histories, Islands

This article discusses ensemble drumming on Kikaijima (Kikai island) in Japan. We apply the metaphor of travel to these drum groups, which reveals how this small island culture is able to sustain, invent, or adopt styles of drumming within the national context as a result of its geographic location, cultural heritage, and island identity. Ethnographic research on Kikaijima revealed a deeply embedded notion of travel, which helps explain how and why Kikaijima’s ensemble drum groups exist on the island today. We use this metaphor with the aim of showing cultural flows in connection with cultures, histories, and islands.

Blurring the Boundaries of Gendered Encounters: Moorish Dancing Girls in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century American Fair Exhibitions

Moroccan dancing women appeared as entertainers in 19th and 20th-century American fair expositions. Their physical and epistemological journeys and their performances on the fair midways have been largely missing from the histories of the Moroccan and American entertainment industries. Their experiences and narratives overseas are stimulating and worth recovering, because they offer suitable settings in which to engage with the complexities of cultural and racial contacts between self and other, and add an interesting dimension to the notion of travel and border crossing in which gendered routes contributed to the shaping of discourses about racial difference. This article looks at North African dancing women, often conflated in American international expositions under the term “belly-dancing girls” and in their local countries, pejoratively, as shikhat (public dancers in Moroccan dialect). I begin with a brief discussion of Deborah Kaption’s Moroccan Female Performers Defining the Social Body (1994) as a pretext for moving beyond the rigid ethnographical discourses about cultural difference. This article sheds light on gendered encounters in the historical context of fair expositions, where live performances helped shape a tradition of self-referential knowledge about oriental dancing women as a site of fantasies, sexual prowess, and erotic desires. It then proceeds to deal with some experiences of the dancers themselves as “living exhibits” and how their live performances contributed to forming not only orientalist discourse but also the oriental and Western subjects. These dancers were individualized subjects and performers who challenged the conventional definitions about oriental female roles and subverted the American Victorian model of femininity.

Drawing Roads, Building Empire: Space and Circulation in Charles D’Oyly's Indian Landscapes

Studies of colonial travel and mobility reveal how spaces are constructed through practices which select and link sites together, drawing fresh itineraries and re-organising places. A series of lithographic sketches published in 1830 as Sketches of the New Road in a Journey from Calcutta to Gyah, drawn by Charles D’Oyly (1781–1845) on his journey from Calcutta to Gaya, captures the tacit colonial imbrication of notions of travel, circulation, landscape and spatial production. An officer posted in various capacities at various places in eastern India in the early part of the nineteenth century, D’Oyly was a prolific amateur painter who sketched and painted different landscapes across the region. His Sketches holds a special significance as his pictures capture and freeze glimpses of a newly-constructed colonial road stretching across the countryside. D’Oyly's plates were intended to celebrate the new colonial circuit as a form of public works, drawing attention away from the urban epicentre of colonial Calcutta. I read this construction as a kind of spatial practice whereby a fresh idea of space emerges through these new operations, supplanting that of pre-colonial India.

Ladies on the Loose: Contemporary Female Travel as a "Promiscuous" Excursion

This paper maps gendered trouble spots in contemporary works of female travel. Since travel itself is a metaphor for the slippage or displacement of cultural knowledge, there is need for closer and more complex readings of the female practice. This paper locates the contemporary female traveller on ground and on page, and flags some of the cultural myths and misconceptions that affect how she moves through the world. When women travel, they inscribe themselves across landscapes that have been previously overlooked, openly discarded and largely unexamined. In doing so, they travel intricate courses due to historical connections between wandering and promiscuity and continuing confusions between issues of mobility and morality in the modern world. Taking gender then as its interpretative parameter, this paper explores the troublesome nature of women’s travel, citing various texts as examples.

Lost in Hanoi: Disorientation, Travel, and Urban Space

Using a 2010 trip to Hanoi, Vietnam, this article looks at the ways that disorientation is used as a trope within the urban environment and to create the traveling subject. Suggesting that travel is a form of deliberate disorientation/ orientation, the article focuses on ideas of disorientation within the urban environment and the ways they have been portrayed in Western cultural forms (the flâneur; the derive ) while suggesting these forms are not sufficient to understand the dynamics of travel. Moreover, the article focuses on two forms of travel as disorientation derived from John Zilcosky—the trope of being “lost and found” and that of “the return.” Finally, the article suggests that Marcus Auge’s idea of non-place is not only a sufficient way of conceptualizing contemporary notions of travel, but is also an indicator of something beyond its scope—that of globalization.

The "Narrative is Travel" Metaphor: Between Spatial Sequence and Open Consequence

The “Narrative is Travel” Metaphor:Between Spatial Sequence and Open Consequence Kai Mikkonen (bio) The understanding of narratives is closely tied to the experience of travel. In narrative theory, the travel story features regularly as either the model narrative or the model for narrative. In Vladimir Propp's classic study of story grammar, for instance, the narrative functions are structured along a travel pattern between the hero's departure and return. In more recent narratology and literary history, and in certain interdisciplinary approaches to the study of narrative, the notion of travel may even function as a code or key revealing how the narrative works. In the history of the novel, travel writing has helped to shape the genre. Narratives of travel to exotic lands have informed the modern novel with detailed foreign settings and a sense of authenticity in viewpoint.1 Since the time of the Greek epics different types of journey—the quest, the odyssey, and the adventure—have served as powerful masterplots in literary narratives. For instance, the chronotope of the road, and the metaphor of "the path of life" that it realizes, is a central feature in Mikhail Bakhtin's history of novelistic plot patterns and especially important for what Bakhtin calls the adventure novel of everyday life (120). The journey is universally recognized as a narrative in our culture. The narrative potential of travel lies in the fact that we recognize in it temporal and spatial structures that call for narration. The different stages of travel—departure, voyage, encounters on the road, and return—provide any story with a temporal structure that raises certain expectations of things to happen. Perhaps because of this pervasiveness of the travel narrative, we have come to understand personal life and mental development as a voyage. The travel metaphor is therefore not only a way to think about narrative; it also provides one with the means to think through narrative. [End Page 286] The question of the relation between travel and narrative is indeed large and complex. Here I will work from a narrower conception of narrative as travel (or as travel writing) so as to investigate the motivation behind the metaphor and to focus specifically on the question of the relation between narrative consecutiveness and consequence. I will develop the ideas of consecutiveness and consequence around two specific generic features and expectations of travel narratives. On the one hand, travel experience and travel writing presuppose the sense of a consecution of places, and events happening in particular places. The travel concept, and especially the journey plot pattern, manifests a specific model of temporality and causality—travel entails the arrangement of points of actuality in temporal order. On the other hand, the notion of travel is prone to give identity and narrativity to a series of events since it "humanizes" the experience of time and space. A travel story is dependent on the projection and experience of a world from a particular perspective, a person or a group of people moving through space in a given time, enabling thus the treatment of space as a stage for possible narrative action. Narrative progress, therefore, is intimately related to, even if does not always equal, the representation of the traveler's experience of space and time. My analysis has three goals: (1) to highlight the significance and some of the limitations of the metaphor of travel in narrative theory and textual analysis; (2) to rethink some of the identifying traits and expectations of travel writing through concepts of temporality, causality, and narrative experientiality as they are developed in narrative theory; (3) to extend cognitive-linguistic research on metaphors into the specifics of narrative form, specifically the issue of the relation between consecutiveness and consequence in travel narratives. In order to illustrate these theoretical points, I will toward the end of the essay offer an analysis of Graham Greene's travel narrative Journey Without Maps (1936). Greene's narrative is particularly pertinent to the questions raised here since it foregrounds the relationship between consecutiveness and consequence by questioning the meaning of maps and by projecting a narrative voice concerned with the issue of how to narrativize the flow of travel experience in the...

‘The Unending Revolt’: Travel in an Era of Modernism

My essay tests Hans Enzensberger's notion of travel as an act of revolt: what he called a ‘critique of that from which it withdraws’ (Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘A Theory of Tourism’, New German Critique 68 (Spring-Summer 1996), p. 135). Via a study of travel writing on the Balkans, I explore the links between inter-war styles of travel and the modernist current within Anglo-American literature which, with its profound misgivings about modern civilisation, had come to view abroad as a place of revelation and escape. At the same time, the essay looks at how the self-constructions of travel writers had come to reflect the new identity positions that were being explored in canonical modernism. In contrast to the imperial masculinities so often displayed by the Victorians, inter-war travellers presented an alternative Englishness, one that was worldly, artistic, sensitive to spiritual and cultural experiences, practised in alien customs and, with its frequent deployment of self-reflexive and impressionistic styles of writing, proficient in innovative literary technique.

Travel Writing at the End of Empire: A Pom Named Bruce and the Mad White Giant

THE PRACTICE OF TRAVEL WRITING, and that of reading books, was inextricably intertwined with creation and maintenance of European imperialism. Travel and its by-product writing were both enabled by and essential to, both cause and effect of, project of imperial expansionism. As Sara Mills points out in Discourses of Difference, for many recent critics (that is since appearance of Edward Said's Orientalism [1978]), writing is essentially an instrument within colonial expansion and served to reinforce colonial rule once in (2). Travel books were essential to European imperialism in that implicated their readers vicariously in imperialist project. Mary Louise Pratt's influential Imperial Eyes shows books by Europeans about non-European parts of world went (and go) about creating domestic subject of Euroimperialism; how have engaged metropolitan reading publics with (or to) expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to very few (4). Travel narratives, as part of what David Spurr has called the rhetoric of empire, provided imperial administrators with information about furthest reaches of (or beyond), facilitating Empire's expansion and administration, while constituting the Empire for its readers. These narratives allowed Europeans, most of whom would never set foot in places described, to imagine vast of which they were in control. As Ann Laura Stoler shows in Race and Education of Desire, imperial project was essential to constitution of identities--racial, sexual, and national. Travel, which denotes range of material, spatial that produce knowledges, stories, traditions, comportments, musics, books, diaries, and other cultural expressions (Clifford 35), repeatedly reconstituted and imperial identities through necessarily repetitive nature of its performance. Furthermore, genre of writing, particularly subgenre that we might call travel, (1) was cultural by-product of imperialism, often written by those actively involved in expansion or maintenance of (explorers, soldiers, administrators, missionaries, journalists), and dependent upon support of institutions of imperialism in order to facilitate writers' travels. Travel and writing are determined by and determine gender, racial identity, national identity, economic status and host of other interrelated markers of status and privilege. Travel is inextricably implicated in a history of European, literary, male, bourgeois, scientific, heroic, recreational meanings and practices (Clifford 33), and simultaneously invokes and disavows those connotations in producing travelling subject. Some of socio-cultural markings implied by term travel are illustrated in following passage from guide to adventure travel: Take, for example, Manhattan writer Fran Lebowitz, who defines outdoors as a place you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into taxicab. To Fran, twenty-minute walk through New Jersey suburbs would qualify as an adventurous undertaking, fraught with risk of falling branches, unforeseeable danger of Lyme disease, and unexpected excitement of an encounter with squirrel. To mountaineer Reinhold Messner, on other hand, an expedition to summit of Mount Everest, using supplemental oxygen, probably would not qualify as particularly exciting or remarkable experience, since he's already climbed Everest couple of times without oxygen, once by himself. (Noland xiii) The distinction that Noland is making between two types of travellers is clearly marked by discourses of gender, race (Jew/German), and nationality (American/Austrian), as well as others. The point is that such discourses are always embedded within notion of travel. …