(Other)worldly Encounters: Foreignness in Contemporary Travel Writing
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Authors
Carruthers, Robyn
Date
2024-07-03
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
travel writing , world literature , otherworldliness , postcolonialism , planetarity
Alternative Title
Abstract
This dissertation proposes a new critical paradigm for understanding travel writing’s engagement with the foreign in the contemporary moment: (other)worldliness. The (other)worldly combines a preoccupation with the gritty, politically embedded, and anxiety-ridden reality of the global world (worldliness) with a spiritually inflected longing for some intangible sacred dimension to that reality (otherworldliness). It is a paradigm capable of illuminating the current dominance of what I refer to as two worldly imaginaries: globality and planetarity. Both imaginaries are concerned with the whole world—the former with the global flux and flow of late capitalism and the latter with earth-wide ecosystems, particularly as they are being affected by anthropogenic climate change. Foreignness, using this paradigm, operates as a threshold space, through which the traveler can interpret the world at the intersection of some manifestation of an otherworld. (Other)worldliness thus functions to explore how both worldliness and otherworldliness are constructed and operationalized in the ways travel writing, and its critique, read the world.
This dissertation elaborates on (other)worldliness through an analysis of four exemplars of contemporary travel writing: Pico Iyer’s Sun After Dark, Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks, Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North, and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Each textual analysis builds on the previous one(s), to develop (other)worldliness as 1) entailing a devotional reading practice; 2) illuminating the (other)worldliness of nature; 3) elaborating the relations between the human and the natural; and 4) defining an aesthetic conjoined to the political. These analyses reveal that (other)worldliness responds to a need for renewed attention to the critical problem of how to be in the world but not of it: how to interpret the real-world embeddedness of cultural texts and events in secular human history, without allowing one’s own positionality to dominate or limit that interpretation. My advancement of (other)worldliness, furthermore, opens a critical passage between the typically postcolonial study of travel writing and the resurgent field of world literature. My argument thus elevates travel writing from its usual status as a minor literary genre to an indispensable participant in the necessary task of reshaping the material and non-material makeup of the world.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International