The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka

Abstract

This text has two main objectives: to explore how travel narrative works as a form of cross-cultural representation and to propose a critical method for its study; and to set out the ethical imperatives of travel as a mode of encounter with difference that leads to the performative enactment of becoming other. Besides the works of Deleuze and Guattari, the ethical exploration of the first half of the book is carried out through close engagements with the philosophical works of Heidegger, Spinoza, Levinas, Lyotard and Fanon, and the literary works of writers such as Daniel Defoe, Michel Tournier, Paul Auster, E.M. Forster, Wilson Harris and Franz Kafka. The second part of the book traces a genealogy of the Western non-travelling travel narrative through a reading of Marco Polo's Travels, but it also discusses the works of Aristotle, Dante, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Francois Bernier and Montesquieu.

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