McDissertating

As I mentioned earlier, I've been taking archival documents to McDonald's recently. They seem to like it there (and they don't eat much, which is a good thing).

Monday night, though, I spent some time reading through Casey Blanton's Travel Writing: The Self and the World to get some sense of how folks in literary studies write about travel writing. This book is also part of Routledge's "Genres in Context" series, which sounded good to me because I've been working recently on genre as it pertains to the archives I'm using.

The book gives a broad historical overview of different trends in travel writing related to the notion of "self" and "other". Blanton argues that "travel literature's longevity" might be well explained by "its narrative power, both literal and symbolic." Blanton continues,

The travel narrative is a compelling and seductive form of storytelling. Its reader is swept along on the surface of the text by the pure forward motion of the journey while being initiated into strange and often dangerous new territory. ... Yet, these works resonate with a symbolic and psychological truth that goes beyond their compelling narrative surfaces. The transformation from a literal journey to a psychological or symbolic one may occur for a number of reasons. The shift works on an intuitive level because of what Joseph Campbell calls the existence of the "monomyth," where the hero is seen as one who travels along a path of self-improvement and integration, doing battle with the "others" who are the unresolved parts of himself or herself. Wholeness is associated with homecoming when the quest cycle is complete. ... Whether fiction or nonfiction, there exists in the journey pattern the possibility of a kind of narrative where inner and outer worlds collide. But, as a survey of the development of the genre will show, the balance of that dialogue between the mind of the traveler and the observable world had not remained constant. As the purpose of travel has shifted from political exploration or mercantile errands to travel for its own sake, gradual but fundamental changes have occurred in the narratives that describe these trips. Those changes occur at the nexus of the traveler's concern with inner and outer worlds. (2-3)

I find this analysis interesting because as it tries to explain the general appeal of travel writing, it also points out how historical changes in the purposes and meanings of travel might have affected what travel writers emphasized in their texts.

But it's not yet going far enough for me. I'm more interested in how the travel narratives functioned as specific "events" and as part of particular situated activities. Blanton alludes to this when she writes,

At one end of the spectrum lie the object-bound journey accounts of sailors, pilgrims, and merchants whose trips were inspired by necessity or well-defined purpose: exploration, devotion, or economics. These journey narratives of early travelers usually appear as ships' logs or, more commonly, as in the case of Christopher Columbus, letters to king, sponsor, or loved ones at home. (3)

This is closer to what I'm dealing with in the rep letters (and the other writings of the OSMA reps). Unfortunately, I'm going to have to look elsewhere for analyses that do more than allude to the specific, situated work that travel writing participates in. I think part of the problem is that (as I knew already) literary studies has a different understanding of genre than does rhetorical studies. But I don't think my time with this book was completely wasted--I think Blanton's text does provide me with some idea of how travel writing is typically talked about in literary studies.

[dissertating] [genre] [OSMA] [travel writing]