Voyage and Emotions across Genres

Maria-Ionela Neagu/Sky Marsen

Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti/Flinders University

Not surprisingly, because of the close connection between place and personal identity, there are many links between travel, romance and emotion. In fact, the Romantic era planted the seeds for a new attitude towards writing about travel that foregrounded the role of the narrator and the subjective point of view in describing place. Since that time, developments in writing about travel (or ‘travel writing’ as the genre has often come to be called, especially in journalistic circles) have accentuated the importance of the experiencing self in the way in which a place is represented. The Romantics initiated the link between travel writing and life writing, which has since then become increasingly emphasized.

The proposed volume focuses on the sociolinguistic significance of both voyage and emotion, their ideological implications, starting from the linguistic instances and patterns of their realization in English, French, and Romanian, as embedded in a variety of genres, such as media discourse, the text of literary species, political discourse, the discourse of education, and even the motivational discourse via LEGO® Serious Play®.

Broadly speaking, the topic of research is represented by identifying and explaining the linguistic patterns and argumentation strategies that outline the Self’s journey throughout time and space, the discovery of the Other, of alterity, resulting in the adjustment of emotions, of identity and in the need for legitimization of actions. Drawing on Piotr Cap’s Proximization frameworks (2013, 2017), Mark Johnson’s image schema dynamics (1987), Paul Chilton’s Deictic Space Theory (2004), Zoltan Kovecses’ cognitive approach to the metaphors of emotion (2004), Rachid Amirou’s L’imaginaire touristique (1995), and Edward T. Hall’s perception of ‘hidden’ space (1982), the research papers will uncover the entities and the facets of emotion that pervade the Self’s proximity. Hence, the division of the volume into two parts: 1. Voyage across literary studies; 2. Space and emotions: a discursive approach.

Among the distinctive features that characterize our volume, one may easily notice from the very beginning the range of fields under focus that the concepts of ‘voyage’ and ‘emotion’ pervade, namely: political discourse, the discourse of advertising, literary texts, the discourse of education, and psychotherapeutic discourse. Furthermore, while the first part of the volume highlights the multiple facets of the ‘voyage’ as initiatory journey, as a quest for an existence code, as a spiritual passage that the traveler experiences in search for the Self or for the Other, the second part of the volume seeks to address the temporality and spatiality of emotions, the ideological dimension of the public and private space, outlining at the same time the perception of the voyage as an intercultural and interlinguistic exchange.

The two languages (English and French) of the proposed contributions unite several scholars belonging to different institutions and different fields of research that have been offered the freedom to express their views in the language of their preference.

The structure of the volume

Norbert Col’s chapter entitled Voyages to the End of Gulliver’s Night? The Dynamics of Private and Public Emotions in Gulliver’s Travels represents a great endeavour to depict the anguished, metaphysical issues whereby Gulliver’s initiatory journey is a journey to an alienated self. In a word, the dynamics of public and private emotions point to a Gulliver who has lost himself by trying to fit himself to environments that he cannot inhabit.

Gerald J. Butler’s contribution goes in line with Freud’s idea that “the sexual act is basically something degrading”. In spite of how uninhibited Bardamu in Journey to the End of the Night may appear to be, he reveals in his experiences, especially in his travels to America, that he is no exception to this ‘psychical impotence’, which Freud describes as a very typical condition and, in the end of the novel, Bardamu laments his condition.

In her study, Anca Dobrinescu aims to prove that much of the force of contemporary fiction, especially after the much heralded death of the novel, comes from its ability to discover new subject matters by exploring the Other and the cultural ‘abroad’. Contemporary fiction is analysed starting from the assumption that ‘travelling informs it’ to a large extent, in a mixture of different voices and new ways of perceiving the cultural trends.

Diana Rînciog’s research focuses upon Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence, which together with his travel notes stand proof for his wish to escape the quotidian space. Traveling represents, at the same time, his source of inspiration, if we think about the way he prepared Salammbo, including his visit to Cartagena’s ruins. Flaubert perceives traveling as a means to discover more and to discover himself, just like Montaigne, one of his favourite writers.

In her chapter entitled The Outside and Inside Labyrinth in Satyricon of Petronius, Cristina Iridon highlights the complexity of the Petronian novel, as a result of its morphological features and semantic layer. The novel remains a puzzle to be revealed, even to the modern reader, who is attracted by its original and anti-classical mixture. Its labyrinthic structure symbolizes the trap in which the ancient Neronian society was caught, where all the paths were so tangled that no way back was possible.

In her contribution, Rodica Brad suggests the initiatory travel and the search for spirituality as the key to reading Voyage to Orient by Lamartine. For the poet who proves to be a magician and a prophet, in the good Romantic tradition, the East represents the space of the divine relationship, and the voyage itself is a rite of passage and of initiation responding to the divine will, showing the author the secret goal of the Divinity and the meaning of Providence for him. In Orient, the poet discovered his vocation as a prophet, through the very fact of being sensitive to the differences between people and religions, especially to what people have in common as a religious sentiment, and the human communities as forms of manifestation of this sentiment.

Mihaela-Claudia Trifan’s paper analyses the ways in which a well established myth in Romanian culture was exploited during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime as a means of justifying official propaganda. The myth in question was the belief that foreign travelers are more credible witnesses than the people directly involved in historical events due to their impartiality. The paper focuses on the novels inspired by controversial topics from Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s regime which presented, by contrast, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime as a more humane type of government. In order to increase credibility, many of these novels relied on using a variant of the ‘foreign traveler’ as ‘reflector’ of the narration. However, there are differences between the traditional ‘foreign traveler’ and the Communist ‘outsider witness’ and these differences are symptomatic for the Romanian Communist Regime in general.

The second part of the volume entitled Space and Emotions – A Discursive Approach comprises eight papers that reveal the complexity of these two hidden dimensions of any human being who is able to interact with and connect to the individuals and entities that pervade his/her environment.

Piotr Cap’s research explores the current nexus between Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), focusing on theories of conceptual positioning and perspective-taking in public discourse space. The author assesses the strengths, limitations, and prospects for further operationalization of spatial cognition as a valid methodology in CDA, particularly useful in political discourse studies of ideological conflict and crisis.

Adriana-Viorela Gheban’s paper is concerned with teacher training. Approaching an intercultural and interlinguistic standpoint, the author analyses some testimonies of the sectionaries of 1931 and 1939 of the Normal School of Bouzaréa who exercised their profession in Algeria.

In their contribution entitled Shared Emotion in the Indian and Romanian Cultural Space, Cristina Berariu and Andrea Peterlicean explore gender-related issues such as traditional stereotypes and discrimination in the portrayal of Romanian and Indian women. Along with shared traditional values, similar tendencies are found as regards the change in the image of the modern woman as illustrated in advertising.

Emotion, manifested by various means of expressing language, pervades all the fields of linguistics, including specialized discourses, initially considered to be precise, neutral, objective, rigid. Gabriela Toma (Bănuţoiu)’s study aims to approach the emotional dimension of the scientific and technical discourse, illustrated by examples extracted from the Romanian textbooks for French as a foreign language.

Domnita Tomescu’s scientific contribution surveys the beginnings of the travel literature from the first half of the 19th century as they represented the diffusion in the Romanian space of the occidental foreign toponyms, especially those of socio-cultural notoriety. The literary use of foreign place names has led to the emergence of variants adapted to the specificity of the Romanian language (exonyms). The process of adoption consisted in two phases: firstly, a change of names and a diversification of the foreign forms, followed by the tendency of unification by returning to the original forms.

In her paper, Diana Costea focuses upon the narrative techniques in J.M.G. Le Clézio’s travel stories. The author speaks about a fiction that derives its elements from the travel story, given the fact that the travel story uses the first-person narrative, while the novel uses the third person. In his travel stories, it is identified an instability of the enunciator, but also a very original temporality, marked by uncertainty.

References