scholarly journals Encounters with the Self: Women’s Travel Experience in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (11) ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Rutkowska
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Travel Experience ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Women's Travel

This article examines representations of women’s travel experience in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia (2007) and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. A Journey from Lost to Found (2012). Both authors rely on and, at the same time, subvert generic conventions of masculine and feminine traveling while creating their narrative personas. Alluding to pre-modern cultural meanings of travel and adopting the roles of spiritual pilgrims, the authors renounce their former lives, examine their past mistakes, undergo a transformation and finally regain control of their lives. Paradoxically, though going on a journey is a prerequisite for self-redemption, travel is no longer represented in these texts as an encounter and confrontation with the outer world but rather as a solipsistic practice.

scholarly journals The storying of birth

2020 ◽  
pp. 136345932092586
Author(s):  
Jennifer MacLellan
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
The Self ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Birth Stories ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Birth Narratives ◽  
Selection Of

Birth narratives have been found to provide women with the most accessible and often utilised means for giving voice to their exploration of meaning in their births. The stories women tell of their birth come out of their pre- and post-experience bodies, reproducing society through the sharing of cultural meanings. I recruited a selection of 20 birth stories from a popular ‘mums’ Internet forum in the United Kingdom. Using structural and thematic analyses, I set out to explore how women tell the story of their body in childbirth. This project has contributed evidence to the discussion of women’s experiences of subjectivity in the discursive landscape of birth, while uncovering previously unacknowledged sites of resistance. The linguistic restrictions, sustained by the neoliberal control mechanisms on society and the self, act to shape the reality, feelings, and expressions of birthing women. Naming these silencing strategies, as I have done through the findings of this project, and celebrating women’s discourse on birth, as the explosion of birth stories across the Internet are doing, offer bold moves to challenge the muting status quo of women in birth. Reclaiming women’s language for birth and working to create a new vocabulary encapsulating the experiences of birthing women will also present opportunities for the issue of birth and women’s experiences of it to occupy greater political space with a confident and decisive voice.

Conspicuous souvenirs: Analysing touristic self-presentation through souvenir display

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-504
Author(s):  
Friedericke Kuhn
Keyword(s):  
Social Exchange ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Social Affiliation ◽  
Travel History ◽  
Travel Experience ◽  
Personal Character ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
Tourism Studies

Holiday travel offers the opportunity for self-definition and enhancement of social prestige. Due to the growing importance of self-expressive values within the ongoing course of individualisation, tourists increasingly make use of their travel experience to self-present in a positive way. Yet, tourism studies have not investigated what tourists actually want to communicate about themselves when representing their travel experience through the display of souvenirs. Using semi-structured qualitative interviews, this study examines touristic self-expression and exposes the self-concepts attached to and communicated through the display of souvenirs as material symbols of travel experience. Results show that tourists often have a clear intention to express positive self-messages when showing their souvenirs to others. Souvenirs are used to represent personal character traits, social affiliation to in-groups and neo-tribes, and to demonstrate individual travel history. This article adds to the discussion of individual ascription of meaning to the tourist experience and souvenirs, and gives an insight to the function of souvenirs for self-expression and social exchange.

The Picaro's Journey to the Confessional : The Changing Image of the Hero in the German Bildungsroman

PMLA ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 89 (5) ◽  
pp. 980-992 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Miles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Fragmented Self ◽  
The World

From Goethe's Wilhelm Meister through Keller's Grüner Heinrich to Rilke's Malte, the hero of the German Bildungsroman develops from unselfconscious adventurer in the outer world to compulsive explorer of the world within. This transformation in the hero—from “picaro” to “confessor”—implies a change in the concept of Bildung: the “self” no longer accumulates, but must be re-collected. Wilhelm Meister's unreflective nature aligns him directly with the picaresque hero; essentially, he does not develop. In Keller's novel the hero develops precisely by narrating his picaresque past. Through his confessional notebooks, Rilke's hero, Malte, attempts to overcome the “sickness” of his fragmented self by recollecting his childhood. This transformation of the literary hero in the nineteenth century mirrors in turn the historical rise of alienated, self-conscious man. Beyond Maire the Bildungsroman can only move on to parody, to the anti-Bildungsromane of Kafka, Mann, and Grass, in which both types of hero are parodied.

Religious selfhoods and the city in inter-war Manchester

Urban History ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARLOTTE WILDMAN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:Manchester's processional tradition began in the nineteenth century and every Whit weekend, until the 1960s, Catholics and Protestants organized separate large celebrations. This article argues that the Catholic Whit celebrations peaked in importance between the two world wars and that this was related to the impact of Manchester Corporation's wider investment in urban redevelopment. It is a story about religion and the self, which reveals important details about the cultural meanings of the inter-war city and contributes to an emerging field of cultural geography that explores the relationship between space and faith.

A netnographic study on Chinese women's guimi travel experiences.

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-139
Author(s):  
Xiao-lian Chen ◽  
Barry Mak
Keyword(s):  
Online Communities ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
Travel Experience ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract This chapter aims to provide insight into Chinese women's guimi travel, which typically refers to Chinese women's travel with their best female friends. With the rapid proliferation of online communities in China, travel blogs provide a wealth of data and create opportunities for conducting Internet-based research. Based on 25 travel blogs operated by Chinese female tourists who have engaged in guimi travel, a qualitative netnographic analysis was undertaken to explore the essence of the guimi travel experience, as described by Chinese women. This chapter contributes to existing theories of women's friendships by examining these relationships in the context of tourism. The findings of this chapter are considered through tourism and feminist lenses, suggestions for further research are made, and the theoretical and practical contributions are highlighted.

scholarly journals The Imaginary Self-portrait in the Poem Roman de la Rose

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-105
Author(s):  
Barbara Peklar
Keyword(s):  
Reader Response ◽  
The Self ◽  
Response Theory ◽  
Roman De La Rose ◽  
Guillaume De Lorris ◽  
Reader Response Theory ◽  
External Appearance ◽  
Outer World ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
The Invisible

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter…It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself,” explains the painter who created the evolving portrait of Dorian Gray. Guillaume de Lorris, the author of the medieval poem Roman de la Rose, also presents his soul through the character of the ideal lover, so Amans is a kind of self-portrait. But unlike an ordinary self-portrait, this one does not present the author’s personality. It is painted with words, and such an ekphrastic image is universal or influences the reader in ways that can be explained by the Iser’s reader-response theory. The poem enables the reader to feel love, and transforms him into the ideal courtly lover. As distinct from a painting, the invisible ekphrastic image in this text surpasses appearances and presents the reader with a hidden side of his soul. The object represented by ekphrasis does not exist in the outer world, therefore in the example examined here the reader’s other self is brought into existence. In contrast to a painted self-portrait, which represents the identity of the author, since the picture and the pictured are identical, a word is a sign which refers to something else. A verbal self-portrait which expresses the author’s feelings opens itself up to the reader, who has to complete the image with his imagination. This imaginary image then differs from the external appearance, because it reveals the associated feelings, enables the reader to feel what the author feels, and presents the reader with his other self. The imaginary self-portrait thus does not represent the actual self, but the self that is transformed or improved by the art of love.

scholarly journals The Transcultural Self: Mapping a French Identity in Contemporary Australian Women’s Travel Memoirs

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana De Nooy
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
The Self ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Self In Relation ◽  
Cultural Paradigms ◽  
And Gender ◽  
High Level ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
Rural France ◽  
French Identity

Rare during the twentieth century, at least twenty-nine book-length memoirs of Australians in France have been published since 2000. Unlike their British and American counterparts, these are overwhelmingly written by women, staying as often as not in Paris as in rural France. The relocation inevitably provides the opportunity for reinvention of the self in relation to new surroundings. Striking is the desire among many of these writers to claim a French identity, as evidenced in titles such as: Almost French, How to Be French, My French Life. The paper seeks to understand what enables Frenchness to appear as readily accessible to this group of Australian women and what this version of Frenchness entails. It investigates what constitutes cultural belonging in these memoirs, and the ‘technologies of the self’ by means of which this new identity is crafted, assumed and circulated as a template for others to follow. Curiously, neither a high level of French language proficiency nor long-term residence are considered essential attributes. More often, the authors focus on the availability of alternative forms of female subjectivity, and the invention of a transcultural self is articulated in terms of cultural paradigms of femininity and gender relations.

scholarly journals Die digter in transito: reisverse en liminaliteit in Lykdigte en Ruggespraak van Joan Hambidge

Literator ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-210
Author(s):  
A. Nel
Keyword(s):  
Writing Process ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Travel Experience ◽  
Concrete Experience ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Travel Poetry ◽  
In Transit ◽  
The City

The poet in transit: travel poetry and liminality in Joan Hambidge’s Lykdigte and Ruggespraak In the poem “Versugting” the first person narrator confesses: “reis na reis het ek in gedigte gekarteer, / in woorde opgevang elke slopende liefdeservaring”. The most important themes in Hambidge’s poetry converge in these two lines, namely the travel experience, reflection on the writing process, and love. These themes are the focus of this article. In both volumes under discussion the poet is presented as a traveller in real life. This concrete experience of reality becomes the isolated journey of the psyche and is “translated” and mapped in verse form. The journey as a liminal experience, the poet as the traveller and the writing process as the journey are some of the aspects that will be examined. For the poet the travel experience also implies the search for the beloved/love/the poem, while the transferral of the self causes a feeling of displacement. The city as destination also plays a role in the travel experience, which is experienced in a spatial-poetic manner, and finally becomes a poem itself.

scholarly journals Textual Revision and the Historicity of the Self: Some Factual Inaccuracies in The Prelude

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soheil Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
Reasonable Expectation ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Textual Revision

Abstract Reading Wordsworth’s Prelude implicates us immediately in the politics of autobiographical writing — which deliberately elides, to use Felicity Nussbaum’s words, “the subject’s fragmentations and discontinuities.” But at the same time, one cannot help suspecting that the seemingly reasonable expectation of factual correctness in autobiography can also mask a deep denial of these essential fragmentations and discontinuities in the name of truth. Wordsworth’s revisions of the Prelude afford an insightful means of understanding these issues: here the imperatives of narrative self-constitution far outweigh the imperatives of literal facts. But the misdating of crucial events — such as the composition of the Glad Preamble — do not detract from its validity as autobiographical writing, but rather gives evidence of the self-problematising nature of origins. In fact, the interest in works such as the Prelude lies not in how closely they adhere to historical particularities, but how tenaciously their metaphoric transcendence resists reduction back to these historical particularities. Romantic subjectivity makes no clear distinction between self and the outer world of phenomena — and also it seems between self and self. This becomes abundantly clear in Wordsworth’s appropriation of Dorothy’s experience. In the Prelude this process is traceable eminently through the process of textual revisions as the present study argues.

Spiritual Education for Sustainability in Women With Reference to Autobiographies

2019 ◽  
pp. 114-124
Author(s):  
Papiya Chatterjee ◽  
Deepanjali Mishra
Keyword(s):  
Private Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Education For Sustainability ◽  
Spiritual Education ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Behavioral Traits ◽  
Outer World ◽  
The World

Spirituality is more or less measured with religion and morality, where both these words are emotional and deal with the public and private life. If education as widely accepted, is learning to see with new eyes then agreeably attending to spirituality is consciousness of the self and learning. Spirituality is a way of life where a person acquires greater understanding of himself and the outer world. People with spiritual education and awakening, possess a completely different view of the self and the world and further possess greater virtues and good behavioral traits. The chapter further throws light on the need and importance of spiritual education and learning in the lives of women.

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