Travel Writing/Writing Travel
Session Coordinator: Joshua Grasso
Dept. of English and Languages, East Central University

Ada, OK 74820

jgrasso@mailclerk.ecu.edu

Abstract: ‘To Wheel In Among Them Worse Manners Than Their Own’:

Domestic Travel in Fielding’s The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon

‘ “To Wheel In Among Them Worse Manners Than Their Own”: Domestic Travel in Fielding’s The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,’ examines the role of travel and the travel writer in Fielding’s posthumously published The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1754). Following in the wake of George Anson’s famous travelogue, A Voyage Round the World by George Anson (1748), which boasted of its use and accuracy to a nation of readers, Fielding offers a curious sequel; in this case, a work that questions the very motives of writing a book of one’s travels, particularly when the subject remains fixed, compass-like, on the traveler’s portrait. As Fielding writes, “To make a traveler an agreeable companion to a man of sense, it is necessary, not only that he should have seen much, but that he should have overlooked much of what he hath seen” (Fielding, 5). Fielding’s traveler embodies this uniquely modern manifesto, as his infirmity demands that he spends much of his time aboard ship—and even then, little is reported beyond the frustrations of the domestic traveler. Mocked and humiliated at every turn, Fielding writes of the “savage” atmosphere of English travel, which makes no distinction between provincial interests and the demands of trade. Part diatribe, part manifesto, Fielding’s journal is an attempt to see England in the parade of “wooden castles” on the Thames, and remind her citizens that trade—and the travelers who guide it—demand the nation’s patronage and protection, lest both wash up on the shore battered beyond recognition. It is a curious journey that has no thought of its destination (which Fielding calls “the nastiest city in the world”), and indeed, almost never leaves port; yet it is a journey that deals with the paradox of national consciousness, and how travel, whether written or experienced, shapes our understanding of home.

Works Cited

Fielding, Henry. The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. London: Penguin, 1996.

Joshua Grasso

East Central University

joshuagrasso@prodigy.net

“Work alone will civilize him”: Trollope’s South Africa and the Native Question

Published in 1878, Anthony Trollope’s South Africa entered into a heated public and parliamentary debate over the status of England’s South African colony in the years immediately leading up to the Boer War. When he undertook the trip to South Africa in 1877, Trollope registered the significance of the Cape Colony and Natal as they increasingly drew attention from both proponents and critics of British imperialism on the home front. Written before the Boer War, the governance of Cecil Rhodes and the exploitation of natural resources by the de Beers company, South Africa undertook discursive work that necessarily weighed-in on the racial politics of colonial rule at a period when divisions between “natives,” Dutch and British subjects had a slightly different valence. Yet, how much of the interaction between “natives” and the English was overdetermined from the start?

Examining Trollope’s travelogue for its explicit construction and deployment of structural racism, this paper will ask whether perhaps the polarized racial relations that continue to dominate South African politics in the present had their beginnings before Parliament and the Foreign Office had even fully deliberated the “question” of South Africa in the late Victorian era. Trollope’s professedly liberal position on the “native question” drastically complicates a straightforward reading of a rhetorical deployment of the civilizing mission construct, insofar as the colony’s “discovery” by the Dutch placed the British not in the position of originary usurpers, but rather in that of enlightened colonizers. Still yet, this paper considers the very real possibility that most of Trollope’s travel book had written itself before he even set foot on the Cape. In conversation with larger concerns of travel writing criticism, I hope to use this discussion of Trollope’s text to consider to what degree certain racist discourses actually limited and prescribed the tropes available to write about a colonial location such as South Africa. While not putting forth any formal resolution, this paper will nonetheless complicate an unexamined straightforward temporality of travel writing (that is – travel first, that follows the time of reflection and writing), as I want to suggest that discursively Trollope’s project and its central concerns perhaps overdetermine the ostensible frame of reference: the colonial South African landscape.

Zach Weir

Miami University

weirza@muohio.edu

The Emergence of a Global Consciousness in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Dating back at least fifteen years, most criticism on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) has asked whether or not Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel evidences his racism. This approach is consistent with a reading of the Tsalal episode, done notably by Leslie Fielder, as an allegory for black-white relations in the US South. I don’t wish in this paper to call Poe’s racist attitudes into question; I am more interested in the fallacy of interpreting Pym as a domestic racial drama. What such a fallacy misses, I argue, is the novel’s foregrounding of a dialectical tension between nation

and globe that is structured around various types of travel, circulation, and exchange.

I read Pym in tandem with a series of contemporaneous articles written by Poe on “South-Sea Exploration,” for The Southern Literary Messenger, to show how global travel informs – sometimes supports, sometimes challenges – his understanding of US national power. In both Pym and The Messenger, Poe emphasizes the global circulation of capital over territorial acquisition as the next step in national progress. Commerce in these texts depends upon exploratory travels, or imagined travels, that inevitably result in conflict between white and non-white bodies. Particularly in its treatments of race, Pym marks a transition between the past few hundred years of settler colonialism and the oncoming century and a half of administrative, or high, imperialism and post-industrial globalization. In this paper, I trace the various configurations of nation and globe deployed by Poe, along with the ways in which the travel out of one and into the other denotes emerging social and political subjectivities.

Cory Ledoux

Rice University

cledoux@rice.edu

“Panic in the Streets: Henry James’ Urban Travel Writing”

Fulminating against modern architecture in The American Scene, Henry James asserts that, “One story is good only till another is told, and sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written.” This paper will argue that The American Scene, James’ serialized travel writing from his 1904-1905 visit to America, reveals an anxiety about the changing spaces of modernity that is really James’ worry about the “word,” or his own relevance as an ex-patriot author. The “story” that threatens James after his 20-year absence from America is both the architectural floor of a towering glass and steel construction and the narrative he attempts to craft within this new public space of “economic ingenuity” that dominates New York and collapses the separation between public and private space. This challenge to the private intellectual space of the author within the public space of the built urban environment lands James’ in confusion. As a point of comparison, James details his experience of British urban environments, namely London, in his collection of British travel writing re-published also in 1905, English Hours. Here, James’ need for “a social, an intellectual margin” within the urban realm becomes clear. Only with distance between the private intellectual space of the author and the public space of the city can James find that “the accommodated haunter enjoys the whole” and that narrative “material does arise.” Yet, returning to his experience of New York in The American Scene, James confronts the skyscrapers only to find himself “staring at them as at a world of immovably-closed doors behind which immense ‘material’ lurk[s], material for the artist, the painter of life…who shouldn’t have begun so early and so fatally to fall away from possible initiations.” It is James’ “baffled curiosity” itself, what he describes as “an intellectual adventure forever renounced,” that reveals this early modernist writer’s anxiety as he confronts his need for the certainties of separation between public and private space.

Jennifer Minnen

Bard College

jm263@bard.edu

“Derrida, Counterpath and Travelogue”

In Catherine Malabou’s recent book Counterpath, she interrogates the work of Jacques Derrida, ultimately offering that Derrida has always been writing on the topic of travel. By opening a dialogue with Malabou’s work I intend to look at Derrida’s The Post Card, his essay “Ulysses Gramophone,” and other relevant works to determine what exactly Derrida’s deconstruction of writing can tell us about the travelogue and traveling in general. Specifically I intend to look at the chronicle of Elijah’s progress in the ”Cylcops” chapter of Ulysses and discuss how this passage mirrors Derrida’s (whose given name is Elijah too) perambulations in his work. What can a reading of this scene of Elijah’s movement tell us about Derrida’s own work? How does it speak to his exploration of the autobiography? How can autobiography be represented in travelogues when deconstruction is taken into account? How does traveling interact with Derrida’s ruminations on death? On philosophy? Is there a clear autobiographical progression forward in space toward death that parallels Elijah’s ascension in Ulysses? In history? How does history play a role in opening the limits of autobiography and travel? Finally, how might Heidegger’s conception of holzweg (pathway) complicate Malabou’s discussion of Derrida as evoking and creating counterpathways?

Chris Washington

Miami University

dwashi1583@aol.com