Departures: Travel writing in a post-Bakhtinian world.

摘要

This dissertation examines the work of three contemporary travel writers: V. S. Naipaul, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and Bruce Chatwin. The major concern of the study is the way in which each writer deals with the problems of Self and Other in his work.;In order to place these three writers in an historical context, Chapter One traces the development of travel writing from the early Greek explorers through the "heyday" of travel writing, the 1930's. Here the issue of an observing Self's efforts to describe a foreign Other is the central concern. Chapter Two examines in more detail the Post Modern period and the ways in which the contemporary Zeitgeist allows travel writers to represent a foreign Other in radically different ways from their predecessors. Chapter Two also introduces the work of anthropologists: Clifford Geertz and James Clifford whose work in ethnology mirrors this same kind of radical undermining of the traditional ways of representing the Other. The chapter ends with a close examination of the work of Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, whose interest in "philosophical anthropology" provides the dissertation with a way in which to assess both the themes and the styles of the three individual writers at hand.;Following the historical and philosophical framework of the first two chapters, Chapter Three studies two travel books of V. S. Naipaul in order to show how Naipaul wrestles, sometimes unsuccessfully, with the age-old problems of difference and othering. Chapter Four presents a Polish writer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, whose travel books show how Bakhtin's ideas of polyphony and carnival can be used to overcome the narrative distance between Self and Other. Chapter Five offers an examination of Bruce Chatwin's two travel books, whose experiments in style suggest that all traditional literary and epistemological divisions are open to question. All three writers exhibit the tendencies of a new kind of travel writing that is based on indecipherability rather than certainty and on openness rather than closure. Chapter Six, a short, speculative essay, asks whether these tendencies can lead us to a better understanding of the others who are foreign to us.