Le voyage et la conception déplacée de la diversité

Abstract

Travel and diversity as a dislocated conception. Diversity designates an essential and constitutive conception for Comparative Literature, the discipline which has a particular interest in the Other, the one who is situated outside the limits that define the conform and the habitual. In this respect, the act of going away becomes equivalent to an initiative that might offer an unusual experience for the individual who changes place and discovers a new condition of being and living. Writer travellers, among those who promote such an act of movement, render the experience of the unusual conditions through which the diverse is exposed to their senses. By taking as reference the words of the writer travellers from the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries who represent a geo-cultural diversity, this work aims to display that multitude of conceptual aspects that create for the traveller a condition of exchange, innovation and creativity. Actually, in travel, an exceptional experience takes places that is also the origin of the creation of literary works intended to relate the diverse, a notion with the capacity to propound overtures related to the understanding of the Other and to suggest new ‘displacing’ approaches, which the comparative discipline of literatures can appropriate in a more inclusive, visible and sensible way.