Univerzita Pardubice Fakulta filozofická

Univerzita Pardubice

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English

Publikace detail

Travelogue as a Dialogue

Autoři: Vít Ladislav

Rok: 2018

Druh publikace: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Strana od-do: nestránkováno

Tituly:

Jazyk	Název	Abstrakt	Klíčová slova
eng	Travelogue as a Dialogue	Humanist geographers have produced a fascinating variety of definitions of “place”. Yet, however different their views are, Edward Relph, Yi-Fu Tuan, Tim Cresswell and others all coalesce in an accent on the notions of a boundary, superiority, uniqueness and emotional tie between the human being and location as its most central attributes. W.H. Auden confirms such views through an exceptional engagement with places in his prose and poetry. In all his writing two places tower over all the others in terms of what he called topophilia – a profound imaginative, emotional and intellectual bond to a location. These were the Northern Pennines and Iceland, which Auden placed to the very apex of his mythical geography and wrote about them in exalted terms as unique and sacred places. In 1937 Auden travelled to Iceland with a commission from Faber and Faber to produce a travelogue. The result is Letters from Iceland (1937), co-written with Louis MacNeice. However, the text is no panegyric celebrating local uniqueness and sacredness. Rather, this presentation approaches Auden’s parts of the travelogue as a dialogue in which he engages with the tradition of travel accounts about Iceland. The result is a collection of letters in which Auden assesses the existing body of travelogues in search of his own stylistic niche. I will argue that thanks to such explicit ruminations on the capacity of prose and poetry to engage with places, Letters from Iceland can be approached as a rare map helping us arrive at an understanding of Auden’s life-long convictions about the generic capacity of prose and poetry to serve textual topography.	Travelogue; Dialogue; Auden; Letters from Iceland; genre; topophilia