Carnets (May 2014)
À bord du « Quaker City » et de ses confrères…
Abstract
Who has never felt the ecstatic pleasure of the traveller who boards a transatlantic liner, sails across the thalassic vastness, grows attached to call ports and visits foreign countries which reflect back to them the image of alterity? Indeed, who has never surrendered to the cult of the unknown, a cult made scripturally explicit by narratives of adventurous voyages, religious pilgrimages, or news stories full of exotic and picturesque details? Finally, who has never delighted in the pages of such travel ‘certificates’, written down either as a log book or a literary chronicle, an autobiographic text or even some sociology document? We will try to capture in our traveling-text the foreigner depicted by Charles Darwin, Mark Twain and Emila Pardo Bazán.
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