TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL THEORY

Session Eight

Søren Hattesen BalleEnglish

Department of Culture and Identity

Agenda Introduction: the summary assignment for

today and next time Introduction: today’s session Presentation:

fiction and non-fiction travel writing Romantic and Victorian travel

Class room discussion: Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the

Cevenne (1879) travel writing and the thematic function of comic

anomaly, displaced romance, and allegory

Fiction, non-fiction, and the literary mind

Fictional and non-fictional contracts: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography and ”William J. Clinton”

The literary mind

Travel and Travel Writing Why travel? Why write or make tv programmes about

travel? Why read about travel? Why watch travel programmes http://palinstravels.co.uk/index.php

Travel writing: the key aspects according to Fussel

Fiction Comic novel Romance

Quest Pastoral Picaresque

Allegory

Non-fiction: Essay Memoir Autobiography

Elements of non-fiction in travel writing

Essay: moral purpose Memoir: encounters with great men /

important events Autobiography

Elements of fiction in travel writing

Comic novel Comic anomalies: normal vs weird

Elements of fiction in travel writing

Romance Quest: tripartite structure (home-away-home)

Elements of fiction in travel writing

Romance Pastoral:

Contrasts between an observer and the observed:

Rich – complex – sophisticated - city – morally inferior

Poor – simple - country – morally superior Pastoral elegy

Lament of loss, change, or death

Elements of fiction in travel writing

Romance Quest: tripartite structure (home-away-home) Pastoral (elegy):

Contrasts between an observer and the observed:

Rich – complex – sophisticated - city – morally inferior

Poor – simple - country – morally superior Picaresque: Real vs ideal. Deflation

Elements of fiction in travel writing

Allegory: primary and secondary orders of signification

Travelling = living and dying (life is a journey)

Travelling = reading and writing (what is suggested about the activities of reading and writing?)

Elements of fiction in travel writing

Allegory Travelling = reading and writing Traveller = reader or writer Unknown = the text

Travel writing as ”displaced” romance

”All this is to suggest that the modern travel book is what Northrop Frye would call a myth that has been ’displaced’ – that is, lowered brought down to earth, rendered credible ’scientifically’ […]” (Fussell 1980: 208)

Romantic and Victorian travel

Tourists, travellers, and art Ruins Landscapes

The beautiful: Culture, art: pleasure The picturesque: mediation between the

beautiful and the sublime The sublime: Nature: awe, horror, fear

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)

Anon. The Lonely Wanderer (Photo) www.travelblog.org/Photos/1816850.html

J.M.W. Turner, Tintern Abbey (1794)

Dr. Syntax

Intertextuality Stevenson’s dedication Intertextuality and allegory John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress

(1678)

R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne (1879)

Outline the uses of fictional elements: Comic novel (Does

Stevenson use comic anomalies? How and Why?)

Romance (how and why are the romance elements used?) Quest Pastoral Picaresque

Allegory (Of reading? Of writing? Of life?)

Outline the uses of non-fictional elements Essay (is Stevenson

making a moral point?)

Memoir: Do we learn something about famous people and places?

Autobiography: Do we learn something about Stevenson’s life

R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne (1879), p. 8 My Dear Sidney Colvin, The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and

fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours,

R. L. S.

R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne (1879)