Writing when Being Undone by Travelling. Travel Narrative between ‘Reliance’ and Resilience

Many travels end badly: Nicolas Bouvier reported in Le Poisson-Scorpion his terrible stay in the island of Ceylon (now called Sri-Lanka) in 1955. Michel Vieuchange died at the end of his 1930 hike through the Moroccan desert, and twenty years later Raymond Maufrais knew the same fate in the Guyana jungle. Whereas these two only left behind daily logs of their travels, Nicolas Bouvier elaborated a fully literary work from his Ceylonese shipwreck. Despite their differences, these three documents introduce the issue of how one can report a traumatic experience. This paper analyses the value of writing in the light of the concepts of “reliance” and “resilience”.

Obsessed with Politics : Positions and interventions in Narratives of Travels in Black Africa by André Gide, Albert Londres and Michel Leiris

The three authors and travelers studied in this paper (Albert Londres, André Gide, Michel Leiris) speak out against colonialism. They are critical of its effects in the context of late European colonial rule in black Africa during the late 1920s and early 1930s. For various reasons however, ranging from institutional aspects to personal sensibilities, it was undesirable to interfere in political debates. Hence, the reluctance to subscribe to the role of early intellectuals and public watchmen. They justified their outspokenness with their personal experience as travelers and the urgency of the matter they discussed. It can be shown that the literary forms that resulted from this situation (grand reportage, literary travel log, ethnographic journal) modernized the genre of travel writing in a critical moment of its evolution.

Between Travel Literature and the Social Sciences. Linda Gardelle’s Double Writing

How to bring closer today travel literature and human and social sciences? Sociologist Linda Gardelle has published a travelogue, Aylal, une année en Mongolie (2004), and a scholarly book, Pasteurs nomades de Mongolie. Des sociétés nomades et des États (2010), following her many trips to Mongolia. Cross reading of these two texts shows that the traditional rivalries between the two disciplines have been overcome.

Cook’s Death ; Or, The Birth of the Author

The story of Captain Cook’s death, within the narrative of his third voyage, accomplishes the feat of making Cook the author of a text he could not write. Considered as the apotheosis of the history of scholarly exploration journeys, the "voyage to the Pacific Ocean" becomes a poetic model that retrospectively invites us to re-read all the narratives of scholar travels. It suggests that this genre, although claiming to be scientific in scope, is fully literary and plays a bit of an auctorial role in establishing the authority of the statements retraced. It is the obvious realization of what literary and philosophical critics have called the “function auteur”: a dead individual can only become an author if the author is a textual construct.

The Way You Dress, the Way You Look. How do Egyptian Travellers Feel Looked at when they Travel in Europe ? (1826-1900)

Starting from an anecdote exemplified in the 30th Persian letter where Montesquieu highlights the unrestrained curiosity provoked among Parisian onlookers by the sight of a traveler in Oriental costume, we propose to examine what is at stake in similar scenes reported by Egyptian travelers who visited Europe during the 19th century. At the same time, we attempt to explain why, in this typical situation where the traveler suddenly sees himself being watched by the other, this experience in no way arouses in him a feeling of inferiority as claimed by Timothy Mitchell in Colonising Egypt.

New Breviaries for Modern-Day Travellers. Literary Guides, Vade Mecums and the Theory of Travel Writing at the Beginning of the 20th Century

If the travelogue is still very successful at the beginning of the 21st century, the same goes for all the more unclassifiable genres that put the art of moving into perspective: treatises and talks proliferate to discuss the proper use of travel, in line with the arts of travel with an instructive aim, while dictionaries and anthologies are multiplying to offer alternatives to tourist handbooks. It remains to be seen whether the inventiveness is to be found in the design of the trip or in the form of these vade-mecum: this article shows that the stereotype is perhaps less, nowadays, on the side of travel guides than of the side of theoretical manifestos that would like to take the opposite view of tourism to exalt adventure or, conversely, motionless travel.

Towards a Poetics of Failed Journeys. A Few Examples from the 16th Century

The article raises the following question: what is indeed a complete journey? The outcome of the trip which does not necessarily coincide with the moment of return, but perhaps with the writing of the story itself. Three cases are considered here: that of pilgrims aspiring to face-to-face with God; that of Léry’s story, never brought to end; that of Jacques Cartier which questions the paradigm of the explorer.

Figures of the Author in Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne

What kind of literarity does Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne represents ? This paper tries to answer the question by pointing out that it is primarily a matter of posture. From the nonchalant journalist to the ‘literary daguerreotype’, Gautier defines the literary act as the unfolding of the competence all (good) author should have: describing.

A Slightly Fictive Literature

The travelogue uses the resources offered by fables, sometimes resorts to lies or welcomes daydreams. This “slightly fictitious” prose does not, however, give up on putting the world and the experience of the traveler into words. Its power of seduction is due, in particular, to its inclusion in the field of literatures of the real.

Literary Relations

This article attempts to define and to illustrate in some detail the kind of critical relationship it is possible (and desirable) to develop with early modern travelogues. It then suggests that such a relationship leads to nothing less than a new conception of literature, which could be characterized as constructivist, gradualist and based on a principle of “availability”.