A Suitable Wardrobe: The Lone Female Traveller in Late Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Rosy Aindow, University of Nottingham
This paper will examine the different methods of transport encountered by the lone female traveller in late nineteenth-century fiction. In view of the major developments taking place within public transport systems during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in London, the female traveller became increasingly exposed to close physical, and indeed, sartorial scrutiny. The way in which women presented themselves whilst engaged in such activity therefore shaped and defined both their own experience of travel, and the response of their fellow passengers. To demonstrate these complexities I will draw primarily on the work of George Gissing, an author extremely familiar with the late nineteenth-century city, namely The Odd Women (1893) and The Whirlpool (1897). The fictional register of such journeys reveals an underlying concern with a suitable wardrobe as a means of coping with these episodes. As the work of Judith Walkowitz (City of Dreadful Delight, 1992) suggests, women faced a unique danger within the urban environment due in part, although not exclusively, to the presence of the female prostitute. The fear of mistaken identity, whether this be real or imagined, demanded an attention to appearance which may have formerly passed unrecognised. Whereas previous scholars have located women's presence on the street at the point at which these social anxieties are expressed, I will argue that urban transport revealed its own anxieties, informed yet distinct from the street itself.
Landscape and Perception: The Medieval Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela from an Archaeological Perspective
Julie Candy, University of Glasgow
The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain was one of the great devotional journeys of the medieval world. From the origins of the cult in the ninth century to its peak in popularity during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and beyond, millions of people completed the arduous pilgrimage to the cathedral of St James. Drawn by a collective belief in the divine power of relics and the spiritual profit of the journey, pilgrims travelled established overland routes which led them over rocky mountain passes, across arid plains, through small hamlets and the busy streets of burgeoning cities.
The goal of my Ph.D. research is to consider the world of the medieval pilgrim from an archaeological perspective, and to explore the complex relationship between the religious pilgrimage to Santiago and the landscape of the principal route-way across northern Spain. Three small study areas situated along the Camino de Santiago in the topographically distinct regions of Navarre, the Meseta plain and the León-Galicia borderlands provide the testing ground for this research and the setting for more in-depth questions about the local interaction of people and place.
In this paper I would like to focus on just one aspect of this research, namely how did the places through which the pilgrims travelled shape and inform their experience and perception of the journey? What, for example, was it like to arrive in a town, to leave, to traverse difficult terrain, or to arrive at a pilgrim hospital? Preliminary fieldwork in the study areas demonstrates how an analytical approach to the material culture of the route-way imparts a dynamic view of the medieval experience of pilgrimage.
Vernacular Architecture, Nature and the Sacred: Le Corbusier and the Influence of the 'Journey to the East'
Emma Dummett, University of Edinburgh
Following his training in his native town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, and a short period of apprenticeship in the office of Peter Behrens in Berlin, Le Corbusier set out in May 1911 on a trip which he considered as important for his development as an architect as any of the more formal schooling which he had yet undertaken. Over the course of the next five months, he travelled through Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Greece and Italy. An obsessive documenter all his life, he recorded his trip in sketches, photographs, letters, diaries and dispatches to a La Chaux-de-Fonds newspaper, which published them while he was away. These later became Voyage d'Orient (Journey to the East), the first of many books which Le Corbusier wrote over the course of his career, and the last to be published. He returned to the manuscript in the last months of his life in 1965 to prepare it for publication, changing remarkably little of it. This in itself is evidence of the depth of the impressions which what he saw and experienced in 1911 made on him, and the longevity of their influence. I would argue that the vernacular buildings, which he drew and wrote of during this trip, were more important sources for his work than those which are more usually cited; that is, the early modernist works of Behrens, Auguste Perret, Hans Hoffmann and others. The influence of the "journey to the east" has, I would say, so far been mainly overlooked in the extensive secondary literature on Le Corbusier.
As soon as he returned from his trip, Le Corbusier began to incorporate elements from it in his designs, in particular the summer rooms, balconies, enclosed courtyards, verandas and loggias which are such a feature of the vernacular architecture of hot climates. They allow their users to feel as if they are sitting outside, with the sociability and sense of community which that creates, while providing them with much-needed shade. In other words, they are an example of how architecture can interact harmoniously with its surroundings, working in a negotiation with nature rather than a denial of it. I suggest that it was this openness to nature together with a pragmatic approach to dealing with intense heat and glaring sunlight which was most influential for Le Corbusier. He believed that the nineteenth century industrial cities of the west had caused a complete severance between their inhabitants and the natural environment, forcing them to live deprived of light, air and greenery, which he described as "the essential joys". Le Corbusier's main aim in all his work was to find the architectural and urban forms which could bring about a reconciliation between man and nature - and the hugely important influence of his youthful travels in this process must be taken into account if we are fully to understand his work. I will also discuss the role of Le Corbusier's travels in his attempts to rediscover a sense of symbolic and spiritual meaning in architecture, and question how successful this was.
Planes, Trains, Automobiles... & Space Shuttles: The Function of Travel in the Fiction of Jean Echenoz
Monique Galloway, University of Aberdeen
The French novelist Jean Echenoz is a highly acclaimed fiction writer (winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1999) whose nine novels, written over the last twenty-five years, have used the so-called popular genres of the adventure, spy and detective story as a springboard to explore and revitalise the novelistic form. Travel figures prominently throughout his work. His characters embark on eventful journeys all over France, to nearby countries such as Belgium, or further afield to Malaysia, India, Australia, Guyana, Cameroon and Peru, to the Arctic Circle, to space or in his most recent work, to Heaven and Hell. Although their journeys are always eventful, they cannot be regarded as epic, as the motivation of the characters (to carry out contract killings, kidnap, smuggle arms, run away from a crime, etc.) is invariably well short of heroic, noble or even honest. This is not conventional travel writing, as the images created of the places visited are fleeting, incomplete and intensely subjective. Nor can their journeys be regarded as Bildungsreisen, because the characters return home largely unchanged by their experiences and with no greater sense of their own identity. The characters may wander rather aimlessly round the world, but they are not nomads as they always begin and end their journeys safely at home in Paris.
This article examines the function of travel in the works of Echenoz in the light of his stated preference for writing novels that are grounded in geography rather than history, and his constant quest for locations which will enable him to define his characters in relation to their physical environment and to today's global consumerist society. The article also considers the extent to which Echenoz may be said to be fashioning fictional non-places in the sense elaborated by the anthropologist Marc Augé.
Y tu mamá también: Road Movies Mapping the Nation
Jessie Gibbs, University of Manchester
This paper offers a close textual analysis of a Mexican road movie, and how the film represents and contributes to issues of exclusion and inclusion within individual and national identity politics. The road movie genre is of particular interest in relation to identity politics because it has always been a site for internal and external discovery. The journey that structures such a film is often motivated by a quest, although ultimately the experience of the journey itself proves more important than the completion of the original mission. Movement, an intrinsic feature of the genre, serves as the catalyst for internal change, and as the protagonists struggle with the uncertainties of the unknown, they are able to re-evaluate their own lives while developing new relationships with their travelling companions and acquaintances.
Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) is structured by three conventions of narrative cinema - the road movie, the buddy movie, and the coming-of-age-tale. The decision to examine this film was influenced by its interesting gender dynamics, as illustrated by the two manifestos declared first by the teenage boys, and then the older Luisa. The film appears to subvert the traditional masculine bias associated with both the road movie genre and Mexican national identity. On another level, a series of interesting snap-shots are offered of the different classes who co-exist in urban and rural Mexico, suggesting a more inclusive vision for Mexican national identity than that conventionally expressed. I argue that the road movie genre enables and encourages Cuarón to explore issues of race, class, gender and sexuality within personal and national identity politics: as the protagonists enjoy their apparent freedom of movement through urban and rural spaces, the director traces his interpretations of Mexican history and geography, and Mexican life and death.
"Deep Maps": William Least Heat-Moon's Psychogeographic Cartography Christopher C. Gregory-Guider, University of Sussex
The contemporary American travel-writer, William Least Heat-Moon, uses a dizzying variety of maps and mapping strategies to tap into the spirit of the places he visits. 'I read maps maybe the way some people do holy writ,' remarked the author in an interview. This function of maps as meditative, talismanic scripts that generate new ways of seeing as well as new possibilities for interacting with place and its inhabitants, is the topic my paper explores. I focus in particular on PrairyErth: (A Deep Map), a work whose subtitle hints at Heat-Moon's fascination with the many histories and energies that lie dormant beneath the surface of the American Great Plains. Limiting his perambulations to the confines of Chase County, Kansas, the author employs various mapping strategies to defamiliarise the at first seemingly featureless topography of the region; his 'deep map' reveals the land's infinite richness, accessed, in part, through the dreams and visions inspired by his wanderings. The frequent mention of Native American rituals suggests that travel is an intensely psychic, even spiritual, undertaking in Heat-Moon's works.
Yet it is also an undertaking influenced by, and constructed through, the act of writing; a fact announced by the close proximity of topos ('Prairy') and text ('Map') in the title, PrairyErth: (A Deep Map). The work goes on to reflect at length on the complex relationship between travelling and its graphic inscription as map and as narrative. My paper seeks to illuminate this dialogic relationship between the intertwined itineraries of the foot, mind, and pen in Heat-Moon's works.
Deserts, Cars, Maps and Names
Jim Harold, University of Northumbria, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Captain Claud H. Williams's military report on the potential usage of motor vehicles in the north-western desert of Egypt was published in 1917. Williams's document acted as a large supplement to an earlier report on the military possibilities of the desert and contrived to give form to the many remaining areas where little or no mapping of terrain had occurred. The report was, then, a mix of topographic examination, mapping and a discussion of the logistics of motorised travel in the desert.
The Military Report was written whilst Captain Williams was on secondment to the Light Car Patrols which were a very real forerunner of the Long Range Desert Group of World War II. Williams's report was used by later desert travellers like R.A. Bagnold and W.B. Kennedy Shaw who were to extend further the range of desert knowledge and the possibilities for using cars in the desert. (Shaw, in fact, begins his history of the Long Range Desert Group by referring to the importance of Williams's text.)
This paper will look at Williams's Report, the contribution that it made to knowledge of the Egyptian desert and its effects on the use of cars in desert exploration. It will also touch upon the problems of the naming of topographic sites in the absence of local knowledge.
Following Neruda's Footsteps: A Pilgrimage to Machu Picchu
Penny Johnson, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne
This paper has two aims: the first is to describe a research technique that entails following in the footsteps made by a poet at the beginning stages of the creation of a poem, in order to get a greater understanding of it, and in the hope of producing a better translation. The second aim is to explore the implications, within a theoretical framework of translation studies, of the use of this interpretation technique with regard to the overall translation strategy, and to ascertain whether it goes beyond polarised notions of translation.
A Journey of Discovery on the River of Life: Blood and the Art of Eric Orr Rory Johnstone, Department of Art History, Northumbria University
This paper is an analysis of the work of the North American artist Eric Orr (1939-1998) and in particular of the use of his own blood in his paintings. Noting that blood has cultural resonances beyond its status as biological fact, the two concepts of art as ritual and the use of blood for shock value are examined. By making use of the theories of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, it is proposed that Orr's use of his own blood is a means to relay the essentially abstract and complex nature of blood.
The Wonders and Perils of Air: Crossing Magic Realities in Salman Rushdie's Fiction
Ursula Kluwick, University of Vienna
The narrator of Salman Rushdie's Shame suggests that the resentment migrants evoke is related to their 'conquest of the force of gravity', the fact that they have managed to tear themselves off the ground and fly. Pursuing a similar idea, Rushdie's three subsequent novels, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet focus on the journey through air as an essential element of migration, depicting the act of flying as a movement through a magic realm, a moment of ontological crisis in which the characters are subjected to irrevocable mutations. Upon returning to a ground that is no longer quite solid, Rushdie's migrant characters find themselves half metamorphosed into demonic beasts (The Satanic Verses), besieged by a dizzy feeling of unreality that counteracts any attempt at re-orientation (The Moor's Last Sigh), and assailed by epistemological confusion resulting from miraculous revelations about the existence of an 'otherworld' as well as tears and gashes in the substance of the real (The Ground Beneath Her Feet). This paper investigates the various uses Rushdie's characters make of such magical experiences in mid-air, focusing on how exposure to the supernatural at the moment of travel influences their lives in their new home-countries. I will consider the ways in which the unsettling invasion of the fantastic resembles the characters' violent encounter with new and alien cultures, and how their variously productive and destructive strategies of dealing with their travel experiences can be read as reflections of the continuous choices migrants have to make when faced with the task of striking a balance between their appropriation of and by new cultures.
Surviving Modernity: Sinclair Lewis and the 1920s
Paul-Vincent McInnes, University of Glasgow
Sinclair Lewis has become something of an enigma in American literature. Until recently very little critical work has been focused on him. It has been my aim to write a piece on Lewis that puts him among the most important and necessary writers in American fiction. A prolific writer of more than twenty novels and numerous short stories, he wrote from the turn of the twentieth century until his death in 1951. This article concentrates on his output of the 1920s and deals with his attempt to find solutions for living in a new modern era. He witnessed the cultural changes that occurred in post-war America and recorded the ramifications they had on American life and society. From Main Street (1920) to Dodsworth (1929), Lewis attempted to establish a mode of living in a modern society fronted by technology and commerce. What we see, if we read his oeuvre of the twenties, is a gradual discovery and recognition of a cultural code in which the individual can survive in a protean and commercialised society. What Lewis concludes is, in fact, a form of decentralization - a way for the individual to be both part of and separate from the society which we inhabit. This article posits Lewis as a pre-cursor to contemporary twenty-first century intellectual thought, and we can see his influence in modern European and American satirists such as Michel Houellebecq and Bret-Easton Ellis. My article contends that Lewis shows remarkable prescience in social and intellectual thinking, and his code for living established in the twenties is now being purported by many American intellectuals as a societal form in which to survive the present.
Aloha Ahoy: Tourism and Nostalgia at Honolulu Harbor
Kirsten Møllegaard, English, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Drawing on the critical works of postcolonial scholars in conjunction with theories on semiotics and tourism, this cultural studies paper argues that two main factors contribute to reinforcing and repeating the (neo)-colonial paradigm's persistence in the grand narrative on Hawai'i - namely tourism and nostalgia. Hawai'i's tourism-based economy leaves little room for social change because it is in the interest of the tourist industry to maintain the image of Hawai'i as a welcoming and politically uncomplicated holiday destination. Nostalgia, on the other hand, is the ideological interpretation of the past based on utopian desires in the present. Conjoined, tourism and nostalgia favor the tourist gaze and continue the hegemonic processes that colonize the minds of tourists and locals alike. The discussion focuses on welcoming rituals at Honolulu Harbor and a range of mass-produced texts and non-texts in order to read the harbor as an ideologically charged space, in which the colonial hegemony is visualized in signs, and has sought authentication in various touristic tableaux.
Moving Music: Travelling Musicians and the Introduction of the Viol into James V's Scotland
Emily Peppers, University of Edinburgh
Except for a few astute observations, the history of the introduction of the viol (a bowed string instrument) into Scotland has been glossed over, or ignored altogether by historians. This is due to the lack of documentary evidence surrounding its appearance in Scotland during the second quarter of the sixteenth century. Recent research, however, has demonstrated how social and cultural ties to musical centres on the Continent shaped the introduction of the viol in Scotland, and provides information regarding the origins of the music and players.
How was the viol introduced into Scotland? The answer is intrinsically tied to the royal patronage of travelling musicians. James V was the first Scottish monarch to hear the four-part viol consort during visits to France, possibly first from travelling musicians in his own court. Aware that the most sophisticated courts of the continent employed viol consorts, James V paid professional musicians from Italy, France, and Northern Europe to come to the Stuart court, in an attempt to emulate the opulence and refinement of continental courts.
By comparing the musical function of the viol with the role of other string instruments already in use in early sixteenth-century Scotland, it is possible to infer a clear separation between the use of Scottish instruments and the viol, connecting the musical function of the viol to foreign sources imported by travelling musicians. Not only was the physical form of the viol new to Scotland, its homogenous consort and French chanson-based repertoire were new to Scottish stringed instruments as well. This paper asserts not only the importance of travelling musicians to the introduction and establishment of the viol in Scotland, but also the possibility of gaining a greater understanding of the viol through a comparative study of courtly cultures and musical influence via social and cultural interaction.
Marlow's Journey in Conrad's Heart of Darkness: Criss-crossing the Boundaries of Imperialist Ideology and Epistemology
Ludwig Schnauder, University of Vienna
The essay explores the question of how far Marlow, in the way he perceives and conceptualises Africa and the Africans during his voyage, simply reproduces the stereotypes of imperialist ideology, or manages to critique or even subvert the latter by developing new ways of seeing. Because of his shock at the excesses of imperialist practice he observes in the Congo, Marlow distances himself from his own culture and therefore also from its epistemology. This allows him to turn with interest and sympathy towards those suffering most from the Europeans' 'fantastic invasion': the Africans. He thereby exhibits an attitude which has been termed 'the anthropological urge - to understand and interpret' which is contrary to that of the other whites in Africa who cannot even 'imagine" imagining the other"'. Marlow, however, does not display this enlightened response to Africa throughout his journey. The closer he gets to Kurtz's station, the more he is under psychological pressure which seems to express itself in a reversion to a perception of his surroundings determined by imperialist ideology. Although in this part of his story a number of passages occur which - to the modern reader at least - are clearly racist, it can be shown that Marlow's capacity for sympathetic imagination is still extant. In the course of the relation of his journey, Marlow therefore constantly criss-crosses the epistemological boundaries set by imperialist ideology. His narrative thus not only underlines the perniciousness of ideology, but also points towards possibilities for its subversion and critique.