Introduction to New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 14 (2013) Issue 5 Article 1 Introduction to New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals I-Chun Wang National Sun Yat-sen University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Education Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, Television Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Recommended Citation Wang, I-Chun. "Introduction to New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals." 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This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license. UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Volume 14 Issue 5 (December 2012) Article 1 I-Chun Wang, "Introduction to New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals" <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss5/1> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5 (2012) Special issue New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals Ed. I-Chun Wang <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss5/> I-Chun WANG Introduction to New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals In the following I present a brief and limited text on travel literature with focus on the middle ages to modernity and so with regard to the concept of the Other. According to Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin the construction of Native cultures as primitive or degenerate is a core concept of colonial discourse. During the early modern era, "turning Turk" that resulted from the fear of Ottoman imperialism was considered as blasphemous, while going native in New England of the colonial period was equivalent to a lapse of behavior so that eliminating the Native culture became a part of the bloody history of colonization. Travelers of early modern Europe who tended to be not willing to "go native" tried to either distance themselves from the Native culture and assimilate or eliminate different ethnic groups. Although in a few cases they wore local clothes associating with their physical settings, an early modern traveler was not as free to cross over, traverse territory, or abandon their fixed identities. The journey as involved with identity formation has brought up various topics such as exploring the socialization of the self, physical journey and mind journey, cross-cultural interpretation, and envisioning the future by revisiting the past. As Tim Ingold reminds us, the traveler tends to link a world of maritime experience and home "facilitating global expansion of trade, settlement and empire" (77). Ingold's wayfarer is a passenger who juxtaposes between the home and the unfamiliar and the desire to relocate has specific destinations but those with imperialistic desire seek to occupy the inhabited lands (77). Thus journey and exploration not only suggest mobility but reveal cultural meanings of migration through interpersonal relations and collective reflections on the past history. The basic modules of the study of the journey and exploration include identity formation, aspects of transculturation, displacement, and the quest for belonging while interaction with cultural difference becomes the core concept in most stories of journeys. The journey is a universal motif in mythology and literature: Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gawain, Zal (Ferdowsi, Shahnameh), and Sun Wukong (Journey to the West [Monkey King]) all perform actual, as well as inward mental journeys. The medieval period was replete with examples of journeys about the "Wonders of the East." The earliest report about East is by Herodotus (Wittkower I-Chun Wang, "Introduction to New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals" page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5 (2012): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss5/1> Special issue New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals. Ed. I-Chun Wang 159) (...truncated)