My general aim is to investigate the borders of travel writing as a genre. At what point does travel writing merge with or become something else, such as reportage, literature, memoir, humor, commercial writing? What considerations govern questions of inclusion and exclusion by newspaper travel editors? My inquiry will be informed by personal experience as a travel writer, and by interviews of prominent travel editors.
I tend to work at the fringes, testing the limits of what editors consider appropriate subject matter or suitable form. In examining the writer-editor dialectic, I find the rhetoric of critical discourse helpful. I am a postmodern writer working in a traditionally conservative and centric genre. My paper describes and proposes a working definition for one kind of postmodern travel writing, what I call, "narratives of disruption," and offers speculations on what impact this kind of writing may have on the evolution of the Sunday travel section.
Most newspaper travel writing today can fairly be termed "modernist." The change from pre-modern to modern can be seen, among other ways, as a shift of agency. The static, colonizing eye of the travel writer has been replaced by the dynamic self measuring its own plasticity in the unaccustomed environment obtained by travel. The standard travel narrative these days is a first-person, idiosyncratic account of a particular encounter with representatives of another culture--an account that may reference historical or geographic markers but refrains from making generalizations based on them or on the specific encounter. It is, in a real sense, travel writing for travel writing's sake.
One direction of postmodernism is to take the modernist innovations to odd extremes. In newspaper travel writing, the modernist formula has grown familiar enough that editors are becoming more receptive to postmodern disruptions--in both form and in content--while at the same time maintaining a strong allegiance to traditional generic standards. My paper includes recapitulations of the writer-editor negotiations that ensued when The Philadelphia Inquirer accepted my account of a touristic visit to the semi-disabled nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island (content disruption), and when the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel took my oddly-constructed article on the Parc de la Villette in Paris (form disruption).
My interviews with editors place these particular disruptions in the context of their impressions of trends in travel writing generally, and American newspaper travel writing specifically. My conclusions indicate that The Sunday Newspaper Travel Section itself, a remarkably stable construct for several decades, may be on the verge of a radical disruption of its own. It may disappear, or mutate into something entirely unlike what it now is.
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