ABSTRACT
Critical studies of travel writing have tended to underscore the presence of two opposed narrative strategies. The first strategy focuses on the intersection of travel cultures and the representational orders of imperial power and domination. It follows what we may provisionally describe as a “rationalist” aesthetic. The second strategy, sometimes presented in celebratory
terms, stresses the more modernist link between travel writing and personal expressivity. Its emphasis on interiority, confession, and individuality reflects what we may provisionally call a “romanticist” aesthetic. One narrative register inclines toward the acquisition of information, description of detail and an omniscient point of view; another favors sentiment, the minutia of human subjects and the dramas of subjective experience over the scientific certitude of informational orders.1 This study outlines yet a third trend in a travel writing that has become particularly salient in the era marked by decolonization, mass culture, and the cultural order of late capitalism. Positioned as a kind of revolt against the prevailing traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, I propose that this third current in the genre may be categorized as a literature of “negation.” The subject of the literature of negation may sometimes resemble the heroic and allknowing explorer, or the introspective searcher who, through the journey, refines and narrates a highly individualized articulation of self. Yet when examined at the level of its motivations and fantasies, this literature reflects a sustained effort to compensate for a perceived void produced by the specific conditions of modern social life.
