Ethics of Description (Routledge Research in Travel Writing)

Reeck, Matt

ISBN 10: 0367858649 / ISBN 13: 9780367858643

Published by Routledge, 2023

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9780367858643

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Ethics of Description (Routledge Research in Travel Writing)
• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0367858649
• ISBN 13: 9780367858643
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Ethics of Description: The Anthropological Dispositif and French Modern Travel Writing follows the development of a minor tradition in French literature where metropolitan authors traveling abroad demonstrate their awareness of the ethical conundrums of representing world peoples. During the colonial–modern era, currents of anthropological thought and representational practice are identifiable throughout society, and across literature, the arts, and the sciences. Collectively, they can be theorized as belonging to a dispositif, the anthropological dispositif. The modernization of anthropology serves as an ambivalent interlocutor for the realizations of the writers studied in this book about the difficulties of describing cultural realities that lie largely outside their ken. Anthropology motivates new literary representational strategies that are, alternatively, in keeping with scientific mandates or operate against them. Forty images are analyzed alongside literary works. A postcolonial chapter shows how the ethical awareness of the colonial–modern authors studied have impacted minority self-representation in contemporary France.

About the Author

Matt Reeck is a Guggenheim Fellow in Translation. Having completed his PhD in the Comparative Literature Department at UCLA, he is currently an Adjunct Professor of French and Francophone Studies at St. John’s University.