• If World Literature is the movement of literatures across the world, Travel Literature is the body of literature that deals with movement .i.e. travel with every connotation the word entails.
• Travel Literature is important to comparative literature studies because it is the embodiment of contact between cultures. Travel Writing naturally encompasses the interaction of identity with alterity. It is an interaction that constitutes the core of studies in comparative literature.
• Travel Writing played an important role in literary history:
- It has contributed to the development of personal writing. (diaries, journals, autobiographies… first person narrative)
- It has contributed to the rise of the novel in England: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is a travel narrative.
• Texts of travel literature can be both fiction (although fiction is often based and founded on real travels like is the case of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness) or it can also be non-fiction (for instance, the journals held by the pilgrims like William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation or by explorers who traveled to America like the journal of Captain John Smith or the journal of Captain James Cook)
• Oral narratives about distant places are not excluded from the body of Travel Literature.
• Travel Writing must have existed ever since humans have known travel. However this genre has mainly flourished after the discovery of the Americas.
• According to Mary Campbell: "It is a genre that confronts at their extreme limits, representational tasks proper to a number of literary kinds: the translation of experience into narrative and description, of the strange into the visible, of observation into the verbal construct of fact; the deployment of personal voice in the service of transmitting information (or of creating devotional texts); the manipulation of rhetorical figures for ends other than ornament."
• Travel Writing describes the encounter with the other, with the strange, with the foreign, with the unknown. It is the textuality of a personal discourse accounting for the experience with otherness. Travel narratives are thus known to be Narratives of Difference.
• As Travel narratives work on the basis of an "operation of translation", they are aimed at transforming difference into sameness. They narrate difference and transform it into something intelligible for the self.
• This "operation of translation" causes the othering (marginalization, inferiorization) of difference.
Example of the native Americans:
• The video shows how that which is completely unknown (native americans) is defined in terms of that which is known (indians). Imposing that faulty definition on the native americans attests how the new comers sought only to consolidate their old knowledge as they thought of it as absolute and unquestionable. Their old knowledge is superior and it is imposed on the natives though it is false. By that the natives are othered.
• Columbus is not discovering the Americas per se but comforting his biblical vision of the world. He is seeing in the "new world" what he already knew.
• There is a possibility of narrating difference without othering it. When looking at difference from its inside not its outside. Narrating through the perspective of alterity and otherness by making a detachment from identity and selfhood. It is possible by questioning old personal knowledge and being open for new visions seen through the eyes of the other. For instance Mircea Eliade's The sacred and The Profane looks at the cannibalistic other without value judgement i.e. without any othering "process of transformation".
• There is a possibility of narrating difference without othering it. When looking at difference from its inside not its outside. Narrating through the perspective of alterity and otherness by making a detachment from identity and selfhood. It is possible by questioning old personal knowledge and being open for new visions seen through the eyes of the other. For instance Mircea Eliade's The sacred and The Profane looks at the cannibalistic other without value judgement i.e. without any othering "process of transformation".
• In this respect, travel is not only about the encounter with the Other but also about the encounter with the Self. It is an inner movement from ignorance (innocence) to knowledge through experience. It is a growing up process instead of "transformation process" mainly because it allows for new knowledge to be acquired.
