Letteratura inglese

Lezione 1 - 11/02/2022

Travel literature

Travel literature is a wide and old genre. It goes back to the beginning of the history of men. The criticism about travel writing is very recent; it started at the very end of the 20^th century (about 1980s) with the post-colonial studies that sparked this interest.

Subjects intersecting travel literature

• Literature
• Art history
• Social history
• Philosophy
• Anthropology
• Geography
• Economics
• Sociology
• History of science (from carry to train)
• History of ideas
• Religion (from British perspectives to the African)

Main tendencies in travel studies

Historical: Interest in the development of travel writing across history or in specific historical periods.

Influential: Analyze the influence of travel accounts on other types of literature, particularly novels, poems, art works.

Cultural: Focus on the implications of travel writing as a tool to know and create an image of other cultures.

Women’s studies: When and how women travelled, and what their travelogues were like. Initially, they were seen as objects to be carried to places. Through letters and diaries, we perceive what it was like for women to travel, for example, for religious reasons.

The new mobilities paradigm

It is a perspective opened up by two scholars: John Urry and Mimi Sheller. They suggested changing the way we view travelling: not seeing it as something special but recognizing that travel is ordinary because people move all the time.

All the world seems to be on the move. Asylum seekers, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, sports stars, refugees, backpackers, commuters - these and many others fill the world's airports, buses, ships, and trains. The scale of this traveling is immense.

John Urry, Mimi Sheller, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”, Environment and Planning, 2006, pp. 207-226.

Dislocation and dialogism

Studies of migration, diasporas, and transnational citizenship offered trenchant critiques of the bounded and static categories of nation, ethnicity, community, place, and state within much social science. These works, drawn not only from the social sciences but also from literary and cultural studies, highlight dislocation, displacement, disjuncture, and dialogism as widespread conditions of migrant subjectivity in the world today.

Stability and mobility

Social science has been static in its theory and research. It has not sufficiently examined how, enhanced by various objects and technologies, people move. But also has not seen how images and communications are intermittently on the move and how those actual and potential movements organize and structure social life. In this paradigm, mobilities is used in a broad-ranging generic sense, embracing physical movement such as walking and climbing to movement enhanced by technologies, bikes and buses, cars and trains, ships, and planes.

Relation between places and people

Places are seen as pushing or pulling people to visit. Places are presumed to be relatively fixed, given, and separate from those visiting. Against this ontology of distinct “places” and “people”. Activities are not separate from the places that happen contingently to be visited. Travel is not just a question of getting to the destination.

Will to connect

Why do we connect? One possible answer is given by a philosopher: Georg Simmel on Spatial and Urban Culture “Bridge and Door”, 1909. He says that what characterizes humans is the will to connect, to get in touch. Simmel focuses on this human aspect and he says that the bridge is the feature of architecture that allows connecting to cities, places, countries, and so on.

Questions

• What brings person to person? When? How often? -> 19^th century travel literature vs. 20^th century.
• Imagination and recollection in travel: Involving experiencing or anticipating in one’s imagination the atmosphere of a place. Active development and performances of memory (-> diaries and letters).

Transport history

Means of transportation are important in focusing on how it feels to travel. All travels, be it local or global, generate a range of feelings and emotions in the traveller, the experience of travelling in the means of transport. Thanks to travel literature, we can read about:

• Impact of weather
• Accidents while travelling
• Inconveniences while travelling
• Novelty
• Environment
• Travel companions

Colin Pooley, “Spotlight on the Traveller: individual Experience of Routine Journeys”, 2022

Travelogue: definitions

1. A narrow and exclusive approach

• Travel writing is just the travel book, or travelogue. It is a retrospective, first-person prose narrative of the author’s own journey.
• It has an autobiographical character (“memoir”).
• Guidebooks are not travel writing.
• Limited to “modern travel books”, written from the nineteenth century onwards, exclude any earlier materials.

2. A broader and inclusive approach (also travel books can be seen as travelogues).

• An “umbrella concept”: “it is not a genre, but a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel”. Jan Borm, “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology”, in Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. G. Hooper, T. Youngs, 2004.

List of works which dealt with travel

• Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)
• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) -> considered the first woman writer and the first travel novel
• Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robison Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1729)
• Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (1726)
• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Treasure Island (1883)
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899), Nostromo. A Tale of The Seaboard (1904)
• Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915)
• E. M. Forster, A Room with a View (1908), A Passage to India (1924)

According to the inclusive perspective, these can be considered as travelogues.

Travelogue as a genre

The boundaries of travel writing are extremely blurred: it is difficult to define where “travel writing” ends and other genres begin, such as autobiography, ethnography, nature writing, and fiction. It “borrows freely from the memoir, journalism, letters, guidebooks, confessional narrative, and [fiction]”.

M. Kowaleski (ed.), Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel, 1992. (She is a travel writings critic).

We will consider non-fictional (essays, letters, guidebooks) and fictional works (novels and romantic poems).

Formal features

• Defined by a narrative core (the journey): they tell the story of a journey – “travel plot”. It has an autobiographical stance.
• The voice narrating the journey may appear quite distinct from the real author.
• Language: hybridity in text modes and style (heterogeneous matter).
• Experience of otherness (of the encounter with the other).

The core is the journey but it can be told in flexible ways.

Experience of otherness

Travel writing involves the other, it is an autobiographical experience of otherness. It is a “polyphonous” arena made up of different voices of others during the encounter. They are the report of “an encounter between self and other that is brought about by movement” (Thompson, Travel Writing).

Accounts of travel participate in acts of (inter)cultural perception and cultural construction, in processes of understanding and misunderstanding. These processes are undergone by the traveller on the journey and later experienced by the reader.

- Korte 1999, pp. 5-6

Traveller as cultural mediator

Travel involves these experiences:

• The development of the author-traveller’s self during and after the journey -> movement involves transformation.
• The negotiations and clashes between the author-traveller’s own culture and the new cultural context where they operate.

The performative act of writing implies a manipulation of all autobiographical material since it has to cope with the limitations of language, the reworking of memory, and the author’s choices in organizing his/her experiences. The travel writing is the result of manipulation, change, adjustment, and selection of the writer’s memory.

Even in a form with the apparent immediacy of a travel journal or diary, a writer necessarily picks out significant recent events and organizes those events, and his or her reflections on them, into some sort of narrative, however brief. Travel experience is thus crafted into travel text, and this crafting process must inevitably introduce into the text, to a greater or lesser degree, a fictive dimension.

- Thompson, Travel Writing, 27

Although this kind of writing is non-fiction, there is always a fiction dimension. A travel book is a literary product, which displays a constant interplay between fact and fiction, truth and invention, revelation and construction, information, and entertainment.

Sikstrom, “The Idle Traveller”

There are travelogues that are more “object-bound” and others that are “subject-oriented”. Object-bound travelogues are informational accounts (about people, traditions, and places to visit). They convey basic informative quality. Subject-oriented travelogues are experiential accounts. The interest is in the traveller’s self (autobiographical). According to generalizations, object-bound writings are more typical of males, while subject-bound writings are more typical of females.

An interior voyage

It seems to me that the reader of a good travel-book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage, to description of scenery and so forth, but to an interior, a sentimental or temperamental voyage, which takes place side by side with that outer one; and that the ideal book of this kind offers us, a triple opportunity of exploration – abroad, into the author’s brain, and into our own. It means that reading a travelogue we discover also something about ourselves as travellers.

- Norman Douglas, Experiment, 1926

The aims of the travelogue are to be useful, on one hand, and to give delight, on the other. The classical aim of art is: docere et probare, delectare et movere. Travelogues have these purposes (to be useful, to delight, and to move in particular).

Renaissance travel writing

Travel as a means of education: the Grand Tour. It is a way of travelling started in the 16^th century.

“Advice to travellers” (political education, diplomacy). The traveller involved in the Grand Tour was the young aristocrat, especially the ones studying in Cambridge and Oxford universities. They go on a journey to the continent, they go to the leading countries in Europe (France, Germany, and in particular Italy). Italy was visited especially to get in touch with the roots of western culture (in Rome, Florence, and Venice, for example). The journey took from months to years. They had to exchange with the leaders of these countries, then they went back home and took with them the connections and the knowledge. Travelling abroad and in particular to Italy was seen as something dangerous.

Lezione 2 - 18/02/2022

The Grand Tour, 1600-1790

Travel writing in the later Middle Ages

Various social groups: Kings and courtiers, Students and scholars, Merchants, Missionaries, Pilgrims: Rome and Jerusalem. In 1300: first Jubilee to Rome.

We will start with travels in Italy and Europe stated by English people. We talk about the journey if we want to talk about movement in general; travel has a different meaning. The sense of it depends on means of transport we use (search for these meanings).

The Grand Tour starts in the Renaissance period and ends in the 19^th century. In the Middle Ages, journeys were experienced by various social groups: Kings and courtiers, and students and scholars (higher social classes), but there were also merchants, missionaries, and pilgrims. These people moved for different reasons. Missionaries and pilgrims moved for spiritual reasons. In 1300, Pope Boniface VIII inaugurated the first Jubilee to Rome (from this moment every 25/50 years). The first one was in 1300, an important date because it means that different people from different social classes moved for this travel.

Travel in 1600s

• Philosophical empiricism: John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690. Knowledge rooted in experience, from impressions drawn in through our five senses.
• Colonial exploration and expansion

Travel in the 1600s depended on different factors. One factor is philosophical: empiricism. One important work is the Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, who says that knowledge comes from experience rather than tradition. According to empiricism, tradition and customs derive from direct previous experience. This philosophical framework encouraged traveling, together with exploration and expansion due to the colonialism phenomenon.

Di certo gli inglesi ebbero un posto ben più rilevante nella scoperta dell’Europa. Gli inglesi dell’età elisabettiana sentono più acutamente di altri europei il bisogno di scoprire in primo luogo l’antico continente oltre la Manica, da cui si erano tenuti lontani per complesse ragioni storiche e per un tenace culto dell’insularità.

L’Italia del Gran Tour, da Montaigne a Goethe - C. De Seta, Electa 1993.

Cesare de Seta was the first scholar of foreign travels to Italy. The quote says that the British took part in the discovery of European culture. The English people felt more strongly than other countries the need to discover.

The Grand Tour Paradigm

The Grand Tour was, from start to finish, an ideological exercise. Its leading purpose was to round out the education of young men of the ruling classes by exposing them to the treasured artifacts and ennobling society of the Continent. Usually occurring just after completing studies at Oxford or Cambridge University and running anywhere from one to five years in length, the Tour was a social ritual intended to prepare these young men to assume the leadership positions preordained for them at home. ‘Grand Tour’ began as a French phrase – le grand tour – but it was appropriated by Britons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries whose wealthy nation had created ‘a substantial upper class with enough money and leisure to travel’.

• Many other kinds of journeys, undertaken by many sorts of people for many purposes, were going on.

J. Buzard, “The Grand Tour and after (1660–1840)”, pp. 38-9.

An ideological exercise: first of all because it involved a particular social class, the young aristocrats who finished studies in Oxford and Cambridge universities and wanted to prepare for diplomatic relationships. So it was a formative experience. The grand tour is a sort of social ritual. It involves an encounter of different cultures and it formed young aristocrats to the European culture. That's why it is considered an ideological exercise.

Ars Apodemica

In the Grand Tour, travel is strongly bound to literature. Writing becomes part of the pedagogy of travel. What the traveller saw had to be translated into a text and organized within a frame of narrative, where the journey could be described as well as the places, the people, the works of art. It became properly an art of rhetoric: Ars Apodemica.

German texts are the first ones to offer a method to write about travelling. These writings can be read as milestones in the formation of modern scientific methodology, but also as discourses on social practices of the period. It was a literature genre forged during The Grand Tour period. In this period, this account was codified above all in Germany. By this genre, you can put your travel into words, because it established some rules for writing about travels.

Writing about your journey for other fellows was important to share experiences.

Richard Lassels

Richard Lassels (1603-68); The Voyage of Italy, Paris 1670

“Undertake a Grand Tour of France and the Giro of Italy”

Lassels was a Catholic who travelled in particular to Italy. He is the first one to use the term Grand Tour. He used it to describe the young lords who wanted to go to Italy to learn about art and architecture.

William Aglionby, Painting Illustrated in Three Dialogues, 1685

Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, Giorgio Vasari, 1550. Giorgio Vasari was a Renaissance painter who wrote about the greatest contemporary and former architects, sculptors, and so on. The translation became a point of reference, another work travellers themselves used as a guide.

Renaissance travel writing

Travel as a means of education.

“Advice to travellers” (political education, diplomacy). Political and diplomatic education.

From 1620: politics, aesthetics, sciences, technology, mundane. Also arts, sciences, society, and so to experience the country from a broader perspective.

William Thomas (1524?-1554)

Dedication to the Earl of Warwick: Italy “flourishing in civility”, encouraging wise and learned men to read the book and grasp what profit they may gather by travelling there.

History of Italy (1549).

Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar, with a Dictionary for the better understanding of Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante, gathered into this tongue by William Thomas, 1550.

He was one of the first travellers, and he spent some time in Italy. He wrote two main works: the History of Italy and the Grammar of Italian.