Introduction to Quests, Journeys, and Travel in Literature

Flashcards covering the introductory concepts of literary quests, journey types, theoretical frameworks for travel writing, and the biography of Kazuo Ishiguro.

Mimesis

A Greek word meaning imitation; it explores the question of whether art imitates or reflects reality, often illustrated by the image of a mirror held up to the world.

Erich Auerbach

A Jewish scholar who published the famous work of criticism 'Mimesis' in 1946; he wrote the text mostly from memory while displaced from his home and books during World War II.

Luminous Mimesis

A type of reflection where the narrative provides a complete understanding of a character's thoughts, motives, and actions, such as in the Odyssey.

Obscure Mimesis

A narrative style where motives are hidden, interior, or unclear to the audience, exemplified by the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.

Quest Narrative

An archetypal story structure that requires four elements: a hero, a goal, a challenging journey, and a meaningful transformation.

Gilgamesh

An ancient text described as a search for immortality.

The Odyssey

A quest narrative centered on Odysseus (or Ulysses) and his journey to return home and reclaim his kingdom.

Heart of Darkness

A 105-page novella by Joseph Conrad about a character named Marlow who takes a steamship voyage to the Belgian Congo to find a man named Kurtz.

The beavers

A text by William Volkner in the southern Gothic tradition that features a character requiring street marks rather than physical courage or noble virtue.

Geographical Transformation

A dramatic shift in location where a character journeys into unfamiliar, extreme, or uncanny environments.

Ethical Transformation

A quest that places emphasis on the hero's values and moral beliefs about right and wrong, which are tested and revised over the course of the narrative.

Existential Transformation

A quest centering on the hero gaining a new understanding of themselves, which can occur through an entirely interior journey.

Bildungsromat

The fancy term for a coming of age narrative, a genre that often combines geographical, ethical, and existential transformations.

Judith Hamra and Alfred Ben Dixon

Two scholars who argued that travel writing consists of two modes: the autobiographical project and documenting the details of a specific place or society.

Autobiographical Project

A mode of travel writing where the author uses a journey as a means to understand the present and themselves, exemplified by Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden'.

External Record

Travel writing dedicated to documenting a specific society or place to share knowledge with others.

Constitutive Travel Writing

Writing that actively creates the subject and reality through the act of description rather than merely mirroring the world.

Edward Said

The author of the 1978 book 'Orientalism', which discusses how cultures were often portrayed as disordered, exotic, and false.

Mary Louise Trapp

A theorist who introduced the concept of 'contact zones' to describe spaces where different cultures meet and power differentials exist.

Kazuchi Chiguro

A writer born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan, who moved to Surrey in the United Kingdom at age six; his work is marked by a duality of Japanese and British culture.

The Booker Prize

A prestigious British award won by Kazuo Ishiguro in 1989 for his novel 'The Remains of the Day'.

The Nobel Prize

An award given to Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017 for his whole body of work, specifically for novels of great emotional force that uncover the abyss beneath our sense of connection.

Never Let Me Go

A 2005 dystopian novel by Kazuo Ishiguro that takes place in a US boarding school.

The Wonder of England

A fictional guidebook of the United Kingdom featured in the novel 'The Remains of the Day'.