Travel Literature

Catalog description

Within the context of the ill-defined, heterogeneous genre of the travelogue and of today's age of globalization, CNN and the Internet, this seminar will examine the poetics of travel writing based largely albeit not exclusively on travel notebooks, or journaux/carnets de voyage, spanning the 20th century from beginning to end. One of the principal specificities of the texts studied is that they all evince to a lesser or greater degree a paradoxical resistance both to the very idea of travel(ing) as such and to the mimetic rhetoric of traditional travel narratives. We will therefore look at how modern or postmodern texts question, revisit, subvert or reject such key notions of travel literature as exoticism, nostalgia, exile, nomadism, otherness or foreignness vs. selfhood, ethnology and autobiography, etc. Authors considered will include Segalen, Morand, Michaux, Leiris, Levi-Strauss, Butor, Le Clezio, Baudrillard, Bouvier, Jouanard, Leuwers.