SOURCE: Burton, Stacy. “Experience and the Genres of Travel Writing: Bakhtin and Butor.” Romance Studies, no. 21 (winter 1992–spring 1993): 51–62.

In the following essay, Burton uses Mikhail Bakhtin's theories concerning narrative and language to explore the significance of travel and cultural difference in Butor's novels.

Despite its long tradition and popularity, travel literature has only lately begun to receive serious attention in literary history and theory. Until recently, ‘travel books’ were generally treated as light reading, or as biographical artifacts from the lives of great writers; now, their significance as texts about encounters between cultures, sensibilities and imaginations has become strikingly evident. Mary Campbell, Percy Adams and Paul Fussell, for instance, have shown how travel and travel narratives have crucially affected the development of imaginative literature generally, the novel as a genre, and the modern sensibility.¹ Edward Said, Dean MacCannell, Rana Kabbani and other contemporary theorists have insightfully and critically...