Importing displacement: French writers and the aesthetics of travel, 1900--1930

Between 1900 and 1930 French travel narratives mapped a discursive space between exoticism and ethnography. The travel narratives treated in this dissertation focus primarily on the writer\u27s self and thus reveal the subject\u27s relation to the world and the process by which the experience of travel becomes a text. Drawing on an important selection of these writings, this dissertation interrogates the construction of self and text through literal and symbolic shifts within four parameters: subjectivity, time, space and corporeality. Victor Segalen\u27s “Essai sur l\u27exotisme” posits an aesthetic of the diverse that appears when French travelers encounter different selves, times, spaces and bodies. In their texts these writers constantly reevaluate the real journey experienced through the body and the imaginary peregrinations created by the writing mind. In the first chapter by analyzing Segalen\u27s texts on China where he describes apparitions of himself, I study the construction of self as other and the literary dilemma of writing this difference. The second chapter focuses on time as a problem of literary mimesis in travel texts by Blaise Cendrars and Paul Morand. I show the cultural implications of new technologies of travel that enable an aesthetic privileging modern speed while relegating foreign others to a perpetual past. In the third chapter I examine the spaces described by travel narratives and which are difficult to reconcile with geographic reality. Texts by Henri Michaux, Paul Nizan and colonial writers reveal a fascination with mapping the “lost” imaginary of empty space, a zone in which to produce new versions of textual reality. In the fourth chapter I explore travel\u27s real and metaphorical corporeality. Alexandra David-Neel, Isabelle Eberhardt, Albert Londres, and the writers mentioned above present travel as an occasion to explore illicit desires, drug use, transvestitism and sexual difference. The corpus examined prefigures travel\u27s multiple metaphorical implications. Travel will finally find its most powerful expression as an allegory in later twentieth century French critical and literary inquiry into the relative constructions of subjectivity, time, space and corporeality