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Starting with my own travel experiences, and with the help of poets, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Emily Dickinson, I create a theory of displacement, called Vertigo. Vertigo is not only a sense of falling, but a sense of detachment from reality that I felt traversing through different cultures, languages, and worlds for the first time. Vertigo is a liminal, transformative space that allows an individual to experience the created nature of their own worldview and culture. This is also a physical experience, as Bishop, Graham, and Dickinson give evidence to in their poetry, as the individual experiences a heightened sense of their physical bodies. This work acknowledges the privileged position of the traveler, and reveals that often the observations we make in this privileged position can be moves of colonization. Poetry is one way to both acknowledge these moves, and to also show what we can learn from these moments when we continue to question and explore. Additionally, poetry, as a medium of mindful reflection, allows for a language that is capable of handling the physical knowledge of the body; the mental mapping of the cultural and personal realities of the individual; and also the geographic and political landscapes that surround an individual or population, simultaneously. With this understanding, the theoretical framework for displacement, bodies, and place, which Bishop, Graham, and Dickinson give us, is the foundation for exploring how poetry can provide knowledge for more 'scientific' writing, such as, cultural geography or cognitive science. / Master of Arts

My dissertation, The Question of Cross-Cultural Understanding in the Transcultural Travel Narratives about Post-1949 China, aims to intervene in the genre of travel writing and its critical scholarship by studying a flourishing but under-explored archive. Travel literature about (post-) Communist China is abundant and has been proliferating since 1979 when China began to implement its open-door policy. Yet its scholarship is surprisingly scanty. Meanwhile, in the field of travel literature studies, many critics read the genre as one that articulates Western imperialism, an archive where peoples and cultures are defined within conveniently maintained boundaries between home and abroad, West and non-West. Othersin the field of literary and cultural studies as well as other disciplineshave started to question the binary power relationship. However, some of this work may well reinforce the binary opposition, seeking only evidences of the travellers powerlessness in relation to the native; and some, conceiving travel only on a geographical plane, seems unable to transcend the dichotomy of home and abroad, East and West at a theoretical level. My project is committed to further interrogating the binarism constructed by the genre of travel and its scholarship. My intervention is not to argue who gets an upper hand in a hierarchical relationship, but to challenge the stability of the hierarchy by foregrounding the contingency and complexity of cross-cultural relationships. My dissertation engages with the key issue of cross-cultural understanding and explicates various modalities of the travellers interpretation of otherness. By reading Canadian journalist Jan Wong, geophysicist Jock Tuzo Wilson, US Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, American anthropologist Hill Gates, and humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, I examine the ways in which the Western traveller negotiates and interprets foreignness, and probe the consequences of transcultural interactions. The overall argument of my dissertationin dialogue with other scholarship in the fieldis that travel not only (re)produces cultural differences but also paradoxically engenders a cosmopolitan potential that recognizes but transcends them. / English

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MA (English) / Department of English / See the abstract below

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Le récit de voyage en Andalousie est un sous-genre mouvant. Le voyage aux confins de l’Europe permet de repenser l’ailleurs (car le voyageur romantique est pourvu de souvenirs de lectures et de tropismes orientalistes et pittoresques qu’il sera obligé de réviser) comme le familier. Les souvenirs et les légendes de l’invasion maure, de la Reconquista et du départ de Colomb sont très présents aussi bien dans les archives que dans la tradition orale. L’Andalousie apparaît comme un mirage et une utopie, et invite à remonter dans le temps : l’imaginaire œcuménique de l’âge d’or permet de reconsidérer l’histoire, l’actualité et l’avenir de l’Europe, mais aussi des États-Unis (Irving). Par ailleurs, l’Andalousie est une région encore protégée de l’uniformisation. Les écrivains-voyageurs (Gautier notamment) y voient le lieu où élaborer une poétique excentrique fondée sur une confusion volontaire entre réalité et fiction, mais aussi où réfléchir sur la situation mimétique de la littérature, qui tente de s’approprier les moyens de la peinture, et qui surtout est confrontée à l’image photographique naissante – sans compter que l’hybridité de l’architecture hispano-mauresque et la sinuosité des arabesques semblent indescriptibles. Mais le voyage prend aussi une dimension politique, soit que le voyageur soit investi d’une mission gouvernementale (Dumas), soit qu’il se veuille le zélateur d’un cosmopolitisme des marges (Andersen) ou de l’union méditerranéenne (De Amicis). Dans cette perspective, l’étude de la réception des récits de voyage permet de cerner les contradictions d’une époque déchirée entre ambitions impérialistes, revendications nationales et rêves de cosmopolitisme. / The travel narrative in Andalusia is a complex subgenre. The journey to the edge of Europe is an opportunity for the romantic traveler to rethink both what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to him : he is a reader as well as a traveler, and the travel forces him to revise his orientalist and picturesque tropisms. Memories and legends of the Moorish invasion, of the Reconquista and of Columbus’s departure are very present as well in the written archives as in the oral tradition. Andalusia appears both like a mirage and like a utopia, and encourages the traveler to go back in time : nostalgia of ecumenical Golden Age leads to reconsider the past, the present and the future not only of Europe, but also of the United States (Irving). Furthermore, Andalusia is a region still preserved from standardization. Travel writers (including Gautier) see it as the place where they can elaborate an eccentric poetics based on a deliberate confusion between reality and fiction, and where they can reconsider the mimetic status of literature, which is trying to appropriate the means of painting, but which is also facing the evocative accuracy of the nascent photographic image. Moreover, Andalusian architecture’s hybridity and arabesques’ sinuosity seem almost indescribable. But the journey also has political aspects, whether the traveler has to fulfil a governmental mission (Dumas), or on the contrary champions the union of Mediterranean peoples (De Amicis) or a cosmopolitanism respectful of local traditions (Andersen). The reception study helps to identify the contradictions of an era torn between imperialist ambitions, national claims and dreams of cosmopolitanism.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of English, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-61).

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Ao longo do século XIX a Capitania e a Província de São Paulo foram visitadas por alguns viajantes ingleses e norte-americanos. O britânico John Mawe esteve nessas paragens entre o final de 1807 e início de 1808, em busca de minérios e de contratos comerciais. Seu conterrâneo, o comerciante Edmund Pink deixou o Rio de Janeiro durante alguns meses no ano de 1823 para percorrer a região açucareira paulista. O pastor metodista norte-americano Daniel Parish Kidder, como missionário, desembarcou na Província em 1839 para propalar os ensinamentos evangélicos e distribuir exemplares da Bíblia. Alguns anos depois, o missionário James Cooley Fletcher, seu compatriota, esteve em São Paulo, entre junho e julho de 1855, com os mesmos fins, e para aproximar comercial e culturalmente os Estados Unidos e o Brasil. Movido por outros objetivos, J.J. Aubertin, superintendente da Estrada de Ferro de São Paulo, durante 1865 viajou na companhia de um grupo de norte-americanos pelas regiões algodoeiras paulistas a fim de analisar o patamar de desenvolvimento desta lavoura, tendo permanecido na Província entre 1861 e 1868. Diferentes fins impulsionaram a vinda destes viajantes para São Paulo. Apesar das disparidades, através do estudo dos relatos nota-se haver uma ótica econômica e utilitarista em comum, que agrega valores monetários e de uso aos elementos das regiões nas quais estiveram. Eles vieram munidos de um arcabouço cultural fundamentado na valorização do trabalho disciplinado, no uso racional do tempo, na maximização da produção para o aumento do lucro e na exaltação das inovações técnicas. Os viajantes descreveram as diferentes formas de relação com o trabalho e o tempo sob o ponto de vista utilitarista, e consideraram o comportamento geral dos escravos e homens livres pobres diverso do que eles consideravam adequado, como um padrão de ociosidade. Nossa análise está centrada na compreensão deste olhar nos escritos de viagem. / Throughout the nineteenth century, the Captaincy and Province of São Paulo were visited by English and American travelers. English traveler John Mawe visited the area from the end of 1807 to the beginning of 1808, searching for ores and commercial contacts. On the other hand, English merchant Edmund Pink left Rio de Janeiro for some months in 1823 in order to visit the sugar-producing area of São Paulo. American Methodist Episcopal theologian and writer arrived at the Province as a missionary in 1839 in order to preach and distribute copies of the Bible. Another American missionary, James Cooley Fletcher, was in São Paulo from June to July 1855, not only to preach, but also to bring United States and Brazil closer both commercially and culturally. On the other hand, J.J. Aubertin, superintendent of the São Paulo Railway, travelled together with a group of Americans in 1865 to the cotton-producing areas of São Paulo in order to analyze the development of this crop. He remained in the Province from 1861 to 1868. Different purposes motivated the journey of these travelers to São Paulo. In spite of their many differences, the study of their travel narratives reveals a common economic and utilitarian perspective on São Paulo, which includes monetary values and possible uses of the visited areas. Said travelers had a cultural background based on the importance of disciplined work, rational use of time, production maximization in order to increase profits and interest in technical innovations. The aforementioned travelers described the different forms of relationship with labor and time from the utilitarian perspective, thereby considering the general behavior of the slaves and poor free men different from what they deemed adequate. Such behavior was regarded as idleness. This study focuses on the understanding of this perspective in the travelers journals.