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Books and Nomads – Taming the Fear of Travel
Abstract
This paper explores the concept of travel as a phenomenon situated at the intersection of literary genre studies and cultural anthropology, encompassing both topos and metaphor. It posits that travel is a culturally ambiguous term, representing a universal challenge that oscillates between the pursuit of emotional and cognitive fulfilment, and the anxiety and insecurity experienced by the travelling subject. This ambivalent nature of travel is reflected in its dynamic, processual character. Based on Olga Tokarczuk’s novels The Journey of the Book People and Flights, this analysis examines how the fictional and figurative representations of the perils of travel articulate the inherent anxieties associated with this concept, while simultaneously demonstrating how the journey itself facilitates the development of strategies for mitigating those anxieties. Theoretical frameworks include Christopher Vogler’s narrative theory of the hero’s journey, and James Clifford’s conceptualisation of travel as a method of ethnographic fieldwork.
Keywords:
travel, metaphor, narrative, fieldwork, dialogue, camera obscura, terra incognitaDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.