SoP, AcK!
When I first came to college, I was drawn immediately to poststructuralist theories of language. In declaring language’s literally constructive power, they offered, I thought, answers to a long-held question: What happens when we read? How, I wondered, can black lines on a page transport readers again and again to foreign worlds? My work in British and colonial American literatures has directed this theoretical interest toward an examination of the early modern period, when countless stories were written about the otherness of other worlds.
I am fascinated by impossibly articulated awe, by those haunting moments of wondrous horror and horrible wonder that simultaneously tempt and elude language. The seeming inability to translate and remember—to not only recall but to call forth—shapes of wonder, of monstrosity, of sublimity for one’s audience lends a sense of danger to the trembling utterances committed to the page. In creating a kind of paralysis of language, these moments simultaneously erase and generate their witnesses and create communities of readers united by similarly inarticulate brushes with wonder, depending upon them to draw flesh onto the bones of silence, disbelief, amazement, and fear.
I find this paradoxical relationship—between ineffability and the need to tell—most fascinating in the genre of the travel narrative, and its inescapable but ambiguous involvement with the colonial project. Travel narratives, it seems, are necessarily dependent upon their audiences to not only grant validity to a text, but to reconstruct meaning and events that occurred to other people, in other times and places. The traveler journeys with an audience in mind; it is for this audience, I argue in my Literary Studies honors thesis, that the journeys are in fact performed—