Travel and Ethics: Theory and Practice

Description

Despite the recent increase in scholarly activity regarding travel writing and the accompanying proliferation of publications relating to the form, its ethical dimensions have yet to be theorized with sufficient rigour. Drawing from the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, literary studies and modern languages, the contributors in this volume apply themselves to a number of key theoretical questions pertaining to travel writing and ethics, ranging from travel-as-commoditization to encounters with minority languages under threat. Taken collectively, the essays assess key critical legacies from parallel disciplines to the debate so far, such as anthropological theory and postcolonial criticism. Also considered, and of equal significance, are the ethical implications of the form’s parallel genres of writing, such as ethnography and journalism. As some of the contributors argue, innovations in these genres have important implications for the act of theorizing travel writing itself and the mode and spirit in which it continues to be conducted. In the light of such innovations, how might ethical theory maintain its critical edge? Cover Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Introduction: Ethics on the Move 1 Speech Acts: Language, Mobility and Place 2 From Legislative to Interpretive Modes of Travel: Space, Ethics, and Literary Form in Jean Baudrillard’s America 3 Fiction and Affect: Anglophone Travel Writing and the Case of Paraguay 4 Terror 5 Victor Segalen in the Contact Zone: Exoticism, Ethics, and the Traveler and “Travelee” 6 Ethical Encounters with Animal Others in Travel Writing 7 Cultural Sustainability and Postcolonial Island Literatures 8 Gourdes and Dollars: How Travel Writers Spend Money 9 Writing across the Native/Foreign Divide: The Case of Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name 10 “Like a Member of a Free Nation, He Wrote Without Shame”: Foreign Travelers as a Trope in Romanian Cultural Tradition 11 Travelling the Times of Empire 12 The Rhetorics of Arctic Discourse: Reading Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven in Class 13 Hauntings: W.G. Sebald as Travel Writer Bibliography List of Contributors Index