The space of travel

reading and the female voyager

pp. 51-82

in: Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1996

Abstract

Reading has always been seen as an itinerant activity. As armchair travellers dedicated to the pursuit of imaginary worlds we become empathically immersed in a universe far removed from our own. Dazzling fantasies eclipse the banality of home and the familiar. The space of reading may of course still be about rediscovering the appeal of the familiar, or viewing a strange new world without ever leaving home, but dominant critical metaphors of reading today, cognisant of human restlessness and mobility, stress its unhomely effects. As Michel de Certeau writes, "readers are travellers; they move across land belonging to someone else".¹ Voyagers in transit across lands they do not own, readers live on borrowed time, temporarily inhabiting imaginary places that impose their own forms of seduction and control. When the strange is eventually naturalised, the traveller moves on, perpetually seeking the uprooting effects of what is novel or unfamiliar.