The common sense builds a border between fiction and reality. Fiction may be represented by the novel, which is between the 18th and the 19th centuries mainly focussed to sentimental stories. The discourse about reality is generally represented by History and Science. Therefore, the border between fiction and reality has an equivalence, on one hand on the representation of the tree of knowledge in the Encyclopédie (science belongs to reason, history to memory and poetry to imagination), and, on the other hand, on the opposition between imagination and reason. German Idealism tried to recreate a union between the human faculties, imagination and reason, by unifying criticism and poetry. But novelists like Goethe (Elective Affinities), Melville (Mardi) and Flaubert (Bouvard et Pécuchet) tried in very different ways to unify poetry and scientific discourse in a literary project where knowledge becomes the main purpose of the novel. From the goethean ideal of universalism to Flaubert's irony about human aspiration to know, the three novels show different ways to question the relationships between fiction and scientific knowledge and lead to this question: in which way is there a part of human knowledge that can belong only to literature?
The article examines the representation of Native American urban identity in Theodore Van Alst's Sacred Smokes (2018) and Tommy Orange's There There (2018). Drawing upon Stuart Hall's and James Clifford's theories of identity and diaspora and Robert Young's distinction between the "organic" and the "diasporizing" modes of hybridity, it analyzes hybrid strategies through which these texts define their characters' complex diasporic experience and extend the literary tradition of "survivance." The paper argues that by exploring the concepts of history, community, and home and by emphasizing the narrative, imaginative, and relational aspects of their characters' traveling identities, Van Alst's and Orange's texts remain strongly rooted in Native cultural perspective, in particular the "synecdochic" sense of self and the literary trope of "homing." It also maintains that these characters' precarious diasporic situation, albeit confining, allows them the freedom to (re)imagine themselves and thereby transcend their unstable deterritorialized and transcultural position and the realities of dispersal and alienation by inventing new modes of self-coherence and cultural continuity.
This paper addresses travel writing as a genre pregnant with signifying practices of the culture that has produced it and, thus, significantly reflective of the relation between the two sides of the encounter, which is of a pronounced concern now, when the difference between the ideology of European history/ies and the exclusive Balkan heritage has to be reconciled. The travel writing about the Balkans produced since the 1990s -during the turbulent decades that witnessed war, political, and financial crises, but also the region's efforts to stabilize, harmonize, and achieve an access to the European union -likewise reflect a variety of frequently contradictory responses by the travellers. Therefore, we believe that it is a high time to revisit it. This paper will deal with some renowned travellers, Paul Theroux, Robert D. Kaplan, Bill Bryson, Dervla Murphy, but also with texts less familiar to the academic audience.
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