| This study examines the emergence of a new genre that I am provisionally calling “auto-topographic metanarrative.” Examples of this genre have been variously categorized as either postmodern autobiography or postmodern travel writing, yet, the works considered here share a consistent concern with the close relationship of place and identity. Central for the authors of this genre is the issue of being “out-of-place” because of race, culture, ethnicity or gender, a sense that is accentuated in the act of travel. This predicament is often explicitly affected by postcolonial tensions. Presented through a reflexive autobiographical discourse by authors who are often self-described as existing in multiple cultures simultaneously, each of these works asserts the value of the individual's testimony as it is created and documented in the text.;The study opens with a look at the intersection of themes and critical discourses these works bring into play. Bruce Chatwin's deliberate blurring of fact and fiction in The Songlines provides the initiating moment for a consideration of how these works exceed the bounds of travel writing. The genre fusion of Aritha van Herk's Places Far from Ellesmere and Kristjana Gunnars's The Substance of Forgetting and The Rose Garden READING MARCEL PROUST critique cartography and imperialism, in the world and in writing, from radical feminist perspectives that subvert traditional autobiographical practice. V. S. Naipaul's A Way in the World and Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return also appropriate cartography and narrative discourse, reclaiming the postcolonial periphery as a multiplicity of centers to speak from. The conclusion surveys other examples of this genre, attending to the diversity of unique positions expressed in auto-topographic metanarratives. |
