Looking West Looking East: Transatlanic Travel Writing (MLA 2006)

Cultures' attitudes towards their Transatlantic neighbors are not always
admiring. Judgment and unfavorable comparisons are often invoked. In
her travel narrative Domestic Manners of the Americans Frances Trollope
described the Campbell-Own debate of 1829: "All this I think could only
have happened in America. I am not quite sure that it was very
desirable it should have happened any where." About
one-hundred-seventy-five years later, looking from the opposite
direction Joe Queenan observed that: "unlike Americans, who want
everything to be cut and dried, the British people ... are quite
comfortable with a civilization that is a complete mess."

The MLA Discussion Group on Travel Literature seeks papers that
investigate transatlantic travel writing, looking in either direction.
The epigraph notwithstanding, the session's focus is not strictly on
Anglo-American encounters. We invite papers that address transatlantic
travel writing in terms of

<>new world/old word,
north/south,
race,
ethnicity,
visual culture,
film,
photography,
the Black Atlantic,
gender
postcolonialism,
imperialism,
misanthropy,
emulation,
humor,
cultural antagonism,

other approaches

<>Please send three to five hundred word abstracts of fifteen-minute
papers to M. G. Aune, Department of English, North Dakota State
University, Fargo, ND 58105. Or m.aune(at)ndsu.edu. The deadline is 15
March 2006.

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Received on Sat Jan 21 2006 - 13:50:13 EST