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The journey narrative is an archetype of the human imagination, and story-tellers of all times have visualized experiences that occur in time as movements that unfold in space. Taxonomically speaking, a journey can be an escape from a given place, a search for a particular place or object, or the aimless movement between two places, and these three types have been varied from the pilgrimage and the quest to the journey of initiation and the drug-induced ‘trip,’ and found specific national expressions in the Spanish novela picaresca and the German Bildungsroman. For obvious reasons, American literature is especially rich in journey narratives. From the Indian Captivity Tale and the Slave Narrative to the Road Novel and the International Theme, U.S. fictions have spatialized spiritual and mental processes by means of the journey pattern, and writers from different ethnic groups have used this pattern for an exploration of the problems and promises of life in a multicultural society.
We will study the following representative texts:
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832),
- Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977),
- Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero (1985),
- Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (1985).
A first introduction to the topic is provided by Peter Freese, “The ‘Journey of Life’ in American Fiction,” in Peter Freese, ed., The ‘Journey of Life’ in American Life and Literature (Heidelberg: Winter, 2015), pp. 17-63.
Participants are expected to have obtained and read the texts by the beginning of term. |
