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Textual Analysis and Textual Theory

Textual Analysis and Textual Theory. Session Eight Søren Hattesen Balle English Department of Culture and Identity. Agenda. Introduction : the summary assignment for today and next time Introduction : today’s session Presentation : fiction and non-fiction travel writing

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Textual Analysis and Textual Theory

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  1. TextualAnalysis and TextualTheory Session Eight Søren Hattesen Balle English Department of Culture and Identity

  2. Agenda • Introduction: the summary assignment for today and next time • Introduction: today’s session • Presentation: • fiction and non-fiction • travelwriting • Romantic and Victoriantravel • Classroomdiscussion: • Robert Louis Stevenson, Travelswith a Donkey in the Cevenne (1879) • travelwriting and the thematicfunction of comicanomaly, displaced romance, and allegory

  3. Fiction, non-fiction, and the literary mind • Fictional and non-fictionalcontracts: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography and ”William J. Clinton” • The literary mind

  4. Travel and Travel Writing • Why travel? • Why write or make tv programmes about travel? • Why read about travel? • Why watch travel programmes • http://palinstravels.co.uk/index.php

  5. Fiction Comic novel Romance Quest Pastoral Picaresque Allegory Non-fiction: Essay Memoir Autobiography Travel writing: the key aspects according to Fussel

  6. Elements of non-fiction in travel writing • Essay: moral purpose • Memoir: encounters with great men / important events • Autobiography

  7. Elements of fiction in travel writing • Comic novel • Comic anomalies: normal vs weird

  8. Elements of fiction in travel writing • Romance • Quest: tripartite structure (home-away-home)

  9. Elements of fiction in travel writing • Romance • Pastoral: • Contrasts between an observer and the observed: Rich – complex – sophisticated - city – morally inferior Poor – simple - country – morally superior • Pastoral elegy • Lament of loss, change, or death

  10. Elements of fiction in travel writing • Romance • Quest: tripartite structure (home-away-home) • Pastoral (elegy): • Contrasts between an observer and the observed: Rich – complex – sophisticated - city – morally inferior Poor – simple - country – morally superior • Picaresque: Real vs ideal. Deflation

  11. Elements of fiction in travelwriting • Allegory: primary and secondaryorders of signification • Travelling = living and dying (life is a journey) • Travelling = reading and writing (what is suggestedabout the activities of reading and writing?)

  12. Elements of fiction in travel writing • Allegory • Travelling = reading and writing • Traveller = reader or writer • Unknown = the text

  13. Travel writing as ”displaced” romance • ”All this is to suggest that the modern travel book is what Northrop Frye would call a myth that has been ’displaced’ – that is, lowered brought down to earth, rendered credible ’scientifically’ […]” (Fussell 1980: 208)

  14. Romantic and Victorian travel • Tourists, travellers, and art • Ruins • Landscapes • The beautiful: Culture, art: pleasure • The picturesque: mediation between the beautiful and the sublime • The sublime: Nature: awe, horror, fear

  15. Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)

  16. Anon. The Lonely Wanderer (Photo) www.travelblog.org/Photos/1816850.html

  17. J.M.W. Turner, Tintern Abbey (1794)

  18. Dr. Syntax

  19. Intertextuality • Stevenson’s dedication • Intertextuality and allegory • John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress (1678)

  20. Outline the uses of fictional elements: Comic novel (Does Stevenson use comic anomalies? How and Why?) Romance (how and why are the romance elements used?) Quest Pastoral Picaresque Allegory (Of reading? Of writing? Of life?) Outline the uses of non-fictional elements Essay (is Stevenson making a moral point?) Memoir: Do we learn something about famous people and places? Autobiography: Do we learn something about Stevenson’s life R. L. Stevenson, Travelswith a Donkey in the Cevenne(1879)

  21. R. L. Stevenson, Travelswith a Donkey in the Cevenne(1879), p. 8 • My Dear Sidney Colvin, • The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent. • Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours, • R. L. S.

  22. R. L. Stevenson, Travelswith a Donkey in the Cevenne(1879)

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