ABSTRACT
The following three chapters will propose an approach to the question of literary modernity through focusing upon the literary consequences of travel. The intersection of temporal disjunctures in the experience of travel is evoked by Etel Adnan’s definition of THERE as a place arrived through time-travel, “leaving far behind the sea’s whiteness”—the temporal disjuncture in this travel experience is constitutive to a conception of modernity, of a disjuncture that marks present time as distinct from that which came before it. Where in the previous discussion of Alf layla wa laya, the act of translation itself has been shown to be implicated in a process of cultural re-evaluation of the category of literature, here I would now like to look at a similar process traceable in changes in the conventions of writing travel texts in the nineteenth century. The following chapters will present readings on travelogues and faux/fictive travelogues, pursuing the sometimes elusive narrators of these texts as their subjects. Where the previous discussions of Alf layla wa layla and its European incarnations looked purely at the category of literature and the manner by which this category was filled with new criteria of value, the following readings will instead look to the question of subjectivity and character in the authorial/narrating voice of the travel account. Through the discussion of real and fictional travel accounts I intend to construct a genealogy of self-representation as it begins to emerge in literary productions of the nineteenth century. As I will also discuss, this genealogy is a key element to the conception of literary modernity, and sets in motion a trajectory for modernity that exposes the ambivalence for these texts as they have been valued by scholars and readers working within the nationalist-novelist paradigm.
