Ambulatory Aesthetics of Travel and the Translation of Alterities

Abstract

Evoking the most significant ideas of the contemporary world, such as diversity, culture or identity, alterities are associated with the notion of difference which takes manifold forms to get perceptible, visible or disputable in the era of globalization. They indicate the contemporary and communicative human condition which tends to overcome alienating narratives, and create a more inclusive vision of world, a more accurate approach to understand the variation of cultural entities. Such tendency is intimately related to the fact that how the other is translated. The main challenge in this situation becomes the translation of alterities with regards to the use of words which is able to affect the definition of the difference. And as a consequence, translation of the other may become more complex, more worldly as it travels from one cultural landscape to another and thus getting shifted from its previous context to a new one. To unravel the magnitude of the mobility of concepts related to the difference, this paper takes the condition of the traveler as a state of conveyance based on the impressions, comparisons, and creative reinterpretations, and discusses how travel begets an ambulatory pattern of aesthetics to retranslate such concepts from a transnational and transcultural perspective. By referring to the travel writings produced by contemporary Turkish writers, the aim is to show to what extent the translation of alterities contributes to the transferable and extensible outlook regarding the ideas of culture and world after the transitory vision adopted during the travel lifetime.

Presenters

Alaner Imamoglu
Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature, Eskisehir Osmangazi University, Turkey

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

2024 Special Focus—Traveling Concepts: The Transfer and Translation of Ideas in the Humanities

KEYWORDS

Travel literature, Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, Contemporary Narrative, Alterity, Diversity