Call for Papers: Questioning Travel III: Travel Writing, Writing about
Travel Writing, Questioning Ourselves. The Society for American Travel
Writing. American Literature Association Annual Conference, 27-30 May 2004,
Hyatt Regency San Francisco, San Francisco, CA.
The Society for American Travel Writing, a member society of the American
Literature Association, issues a call for papers for a session at the ALA
2004 conference in San Francisco, CA. Entitled Questioning Travel III:
Travel Writing, Writing about Travel Writing, and the Imperial Endeavor, the
session will engage the relationship between criticism of travel writing and
the “imperial endeavor” described by Helen Gilbert and Anna Johnston.
Papers are welcome on specific American authors or on theoretical issues
whose discussion includes American writers.
Papers should be 20 minutes in length. A general statement on the topic and
avenues of inquiry that might helpfully be explored would read as follows:
Gilbert and Johnston write that “Contemporary travel writing may well be
attempting to find a new way to encounter the world, based on less
exploitative and hierarchical relations than those enacted in earlier
periods, but traces of imperial endeavor haunt the very vocabulary, grammar,
form, and subjectivities available to the Western traveler, which, in turn,
makes possible the continued power, influence, and effect of imperial modes
of experiencing and narrating difference.”
If travel writing itself is limited in the ways described above, does
writing about travel writing – analysis and criticism of travel writing
and/or travel writers – find itself limited in similar fashion? In short,
does the growing body of writing about travel writing question the imperial
endeavor, or does it willingly or unwillingly participate in supporting
imperial modes of experiencing and narrating difference?
Abstracts of no more than two pages may be submitted by mail or, preferably,
by email, to Dr. Russ Pottle, Department of Literature, Saint Joseph
Seminary College, Saint Benedict, LA, 70457, or <acdean @sjasc.edu> by 15
January 2004.
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