Travel Writing as a Multi-Dimensional Discourse in Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936), William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways: A Journey into America (1982)

Abstract

The current thesis endeavours to explore one of the vital literary genres, travel writing, with its unique and interdisciplinary structure. The travel text intermingles history, culture, ethnography, anthropology, ideology and many other lively disciplines that contribute to shaping its discourse. Thus the travel discourse is impacted by this intellectual and epistemological diversity which renders it a multi-faceted construct rather than a monologic one. Taking into account the fact and fiction juxtaposition, this research tends to examine the multi-perspectival travel discourse and how it fuels the systematic process of ideological projection of an imperial self at the expense of the mapped other. For the sake of fulfilling an accurate and methodical analysis, we opted for implementing the postcolonial canon as well as the deconstruction approach as we deem the most pertinent methodological instruments to probe deeply into travel, history and discourse-related tropes. Additionally, the crisis of representation is at the core of this research which delves into the covert and overt dimensions of travel through valorising the traveller’s discrete objectives. In fact, what is instilled in any travel narrative is more than an account of exploratory adventures; rather, it is an oriented ideological quest in favour of imperial legacy restoration. Even the explored destinations are portrayed as exotic spaces to entrench and deepen the disparity between these travellers’ realm and the other whose image is always portrayed as an epitome of the uncivilised emblem. All these representations are encoded in the discourse’s racist binaries which transcend the scope of the outward as well as inward journeys.