Contemporary American travel literature illustrates convergences of time and space, creating a borderless and timeless mode of narration. Granted, American travel narratives do not offer the same sort of epic and sweeping scope that epitomize classic works like that of Ibn Battuta and Basho. Contemporary American travel literature is imbued with American mythos. Moreover, contemporary American travel literature demonstrates postmodern tropes and conventions including a strong sense of uncertainty and ungroundedness. Solitary and introspective as they are, the works of Brendan Leonard and Mark Sundeen also exemplify Freudian theories of anxiety. As the importance of nation-state diminishes, the anxieties of identity construction may increase. Postmodern identity construction is less dependent on geographic space because of historical and temporal factors: factors like geographic independence in freelance work and mobility. Yet as liberating as geographic independence can be, it also bestows new anxieties. Those anxieties rise to the surface in travel literature because travel literature as a genre has been viewed as lowbrow, “being seen by some as essentially frivolous or morally dangerous,” (Holland and Huggan vii). Travel narratives by Brendan Leonard and Mark Sundeen depart from the typical vehicles of framing the Other, instead shifting the focus on how travel becomes the means by which to achieve personal and existential goals. An ideal theoretical framework for studying how literary characters deal with their anxiety by going to other places would ideally blend Sigmund Freud’s anxiety theory with Bertrand Westphal’s theories of geocriticism and real and fictional space theory. Additionally, the philosophies of epicureanism and hedonism offer unique lenses with which to understand the function of travel in the postmodern mind, and the role of travel literature more specifically. The essence of epicureanism is that “all activity, even apparently self-sacrificing activity or activity done solely for the sake of virtue or what is noble, is in fact directed toward obtaining pleasure for oneself,” (O’Keefe 1). Epicureanism is similar to hedonism in that its fundamental proposal is that, “pleasure and pain are the only things of ultimate importance,” (Weijers 1). Travel memoirs—indeed any memoirs—are by definition hedonistic and epicurean in the sense that they ooze self-indulgence. Even Mark Sundeen’s anti-materialistic The Man Who Quit Money is ironically self-indulgent in that it uses...
Like Thoreau, Sundeen deliberately eschews modern conveniences but does so from a position of power and privilege. The fact that Sundeen has agency, and acts with the power to choose his lifestyle without money, undermines the genuine struggles of those who live in poverty around the world. It is this disingenuousness that has rendered so much travel literature ethically questionable (Holland and Huggan vii).Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. The Problem of Anxiety. 1936. Digital edition: http://www.bartleby.com/283/25.html
Holland, Patrick and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Leonard, Brendan. The New American Road Trip Mixtape. Semi-Rad Media, 2013.
Leonard, Brendan. Sixty Meters to Anywhere. Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 2016. Kindle Edition.
O’Keefe, Tim. “Epicurus.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/epicur/
Prieto, Eric. “Geocriticism meets ecocriticism. In: Tally R.T., Battista C.M. (eds) Ecocriticism and Geocriticism. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2016.
Spielberger, Charles D. “Objective Anxiety and Neurotic Anxiety.” In Spielberger (Ed.). Anxiety and Behavior. New York: Academic Press, 1966.
Sundeen, Mark. The Man Who Quit Money. New York: Penguin, 2012.
Weijers, Dan. “Hedonism.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/hedonism/
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