UNIVERSITY OF MANOUBA
FACULTY OF LETTERS, ARTS AND HUMANITIES - MANOUBA
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
Conference on "Travel and Travelogues: Quest and Conquest" –
22 and 23 February 2019
Concept Note
The travelogue, travel book and adventure book refer to a literary genre which is as old as travel itself. The genre includes notes, records and works about exploration and adventure in foreign lands. The travelogue can take the form of a diary, an essay, a poem, a short story, a novel or a book. It could relate an actual authentic experience or an imagined one. The earliest travelogue goes back to the fourteenth Century B.C in Egypt with the anonymous record known as The Journeying of the Master of Captains of Egypt, then, The Histories of Herodotus (485 BC), followed by other records in Greek literature and Greek mythology, mainly, the narrative of Xenophon (430 BC) telling about the return from Sardis and the one by Roman Horace (65 BC).
The tradition of travel writing was then revived by Ibn Battutah in the fourteenth century who recorded his twenty-eight year trip, and Al Fasi in the fifteenth century who reported on his journey in the Mediterranean. Indeed, travel writing flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries thanks to the increase in the number of sailors as sailing techniques had developed and the world had become more navigable. Explorers at the time included Vasco Da Gama, Columbus, Francisco de Alvarez, and others. Reports by those explorers have set the travelogue as a recognizable literary genre which reached its apogee in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Landmarks of the time included Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721), Defoe’s A Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain (1724) and Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).
In the nineteenth century, the travel book gained more popularity and it had an important role in shaping and promoting the ideologies of the empire. Travellers, at the time, went beyond the European continent and wrote about the visited lands, usually considered as the “outside” world: uncivilized, empty, awkward, inferior, savage, exotic… Travellers’ records on what they had experienced provided an evidence for the supporters of the colonizing project to prove the necessity of exploiting the lands 'discovered'. Personal experiences of travellers had been presented as universalized knowledge, and inhabitants of the visited areas were homogenized as inferior species. This belief was 'backed' by the work of science and anthropology and coincided with the publication of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species (1858). In brief, travel writing was perceived as a sub-story of the grand narrative of Imperialism as it paved the way for the colonial adventure.
Even more, the journey has gathered an oedipal “resonance”: the moment of leaving home is an illustration of the traveller’s rejection of the paternal authority, an evolution from adolescence to adulthood, and an escape from all ties: “a refutation of the father and a denial of intimacy with the mother, the necessary condition of entry into language and access unto law,” as Clark puts it in his book Travel Writing and Empire. Travelling fulfils an everlasting desire to escape home, cross the sea and come back as a “hero”. It satisfies a desire within the child to go further than the father and be beyond his reach. It is, indeed, a quest of an identity set against the one of the “other” encountered in the visited areas. Thus, the traveller makes a shift from “seeing” to “witnessing” which means that they “see a fragment and then imagine the rest in the act of appropriation,” as Greenblatt explains it. The journey is also not free from “paranoia”: an anxiety of being entrapped and absorbed by the new space. That is why, narratives in travelogues turn around the subtle, entangled relationship between “seeing,” “watching” and “witnessing” as the traveller proves the desire to be “here” where they are and “there” where they were, and there is no better way to fulfil such a desire other than writing.
It is worth noting, however, that travel writing has for long been considered a patriarchal privilege from which the female figure has either been absented or marginalized. The records of women travellers are very scarce and they were considered as no more than silly records of some sensitive, delicate feelings by a sensitive creature whose narratives cannot be “objective” or “trustworthy”. There is no better example to illustrate the woman’s place in travel literature than that of Penelope (Odysseus’s wife) in Greek mythology who spent her life waiting for the return of her husband from his journey. Another role of the female in travel writing is “the guardian of the memory,” the one who memorizes the action rather than performs it: a role played by the housekeeper in Odysseus’s myth who could recognize him when he came back because of the scar in his feet. Nevertheless, the way an adventurer portrays the visited areas reveals a strong parallel between the land and the female body: both are desired, objectified and subordinated. Such a parallel has been inspiring feminist theorists and post- colonial ones as a space from where to “speak”.
In a modern context characterized by fluidity of space because of globalization, travel writing has put on a new garb and acquired new themes. Indeed, new concerns have come to the surface, mainly tourist ones, without however cutting with old motifs: mainly, the quest for identity. With new waves of immigration, writers blurred their experiences into a developed concern with comparative studies rather than focusing on a target culture. Immigrant writers tend to compare the narratives of the host society with the ones back home, as they seek to find “their” space. This new tendency has much in common with “exile” literature which flourished in the beginning of the twentieth century.
Accordingly, travel writing emerges as an intersective area where different disciplines and theories meet. It developed through history, and it closely enmeshed with the individual and the community. It is also a field of study where the literal and the metaphorical merge and where it is hard to draw the line between what is 'authentic' and what is imagined.
Areas of interest
- The journey (quest - exploration - intrusion) motif
- The gaze (seeing - watching - witnessing - telling) motif
- The memory (the objective - the subjective) motif
- The expansive (the authoritative - the romanticized - the ideologized - the manipulative - the demonizational - the oedipal – the hero making) motif
- The competing narratives (grand-/mega-narratives vs narratives/counter-narratives) motif
- The encounter (comparative - target culture focus - home culture focus - look (talk / tell)
back in anger - love and hate) motif
- The language (bond - bondage) motif – travelling “words” or “words” of travelling
- The translational (loyalty pulls - representation/misrepresentation) motif.
Conference Formats
The Conference will comprise plenary sessions and panels. Doctoral students are encouraged to submit Abstracts for the panels.
Kindly, submit an Abstract of no longer than 250 words (together with a short list of keywords).
Conference Venue
Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities - Manouba
Address: Manouba - 2010 / Tunis (TUNISIA)
Important Dates:
Deadline to submit Abstracts: 15 October 2018
Notification of acceptance: 15 November 2018
Final paper submission: 15 January 2019
Please send your abstract to: englishdepartment.manouba@gmail.com
Organizing Committee:
- Mohamed Mansouri
- Sadok Bouhlila
-Anne Murray
- Nabil Cherni
- Lobna Ben Salem
-Oussama Ayara
- Hajer Yousfi
-Amel Jaidi
-Nadia Bouchhioua
-Hajer Miledi
-Faiza Derbel
-Dorra Touzri
For any enquiry, please contact: englishdepartment.manouba@gmail.com