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of hospitality as well.
My major concern is to discuss the interrelationship among different characters in the process of traveling; therefore, I intend to read New Anatomies as the genre of travel literature by means of examining its traveling features in advance. Since the encounter with the other is the most obvious feature in the play, it will be my central concern. Julia Kristeva’s notion of strangers to ourselves reveals psychological confrontation between the westerners and the colonized in New Anatomies while Derrida goes further to manifest ethical concern in the diverse condition of human interrelationship by showing that there shall be struggle between hostility and hospitality.
1.4 Chapter Organization
Chapter One serves as an introductory chapter that carries out the concern of the thesis. The thesis is composed of four other chapters.
Chapter Two, “The Stranger on the Move,” situates New Anatomies within traveling context by observing its traveling features. It is the leading chapter that facilitates the study of the problems of traveling, which will be further explored in the sequential chapters. Traveling in its most common definition regards the act of traversing spaces.
Syed Manzural Islam introduces the concept of sedentary travel and nomadic travel to explain that traveling between fixed points is only an act of traversing threshold. In order to carry out a voyage, one needs to go further to transcend boundaries between oneself and the other. Consequently, the ideas that a traveler has to face the unfamiliar and to confront the difference in a voyage are the essential elements in a voyage. New
Anatomies is a play that depicts Isabelle Eberhardt’s traveling experience. The play deals
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with the ideas of displacement, nomadic traveling, and the encounter with the other. In the play, most Europeans draw out the difference between Europe and Africa by means of degrading Algerians. Unlike the other Europeans, Isabelle manages to learn about the new culture and to make friends with the locals in Algiers without prejudice. Isabelle’s sincere desire to break the boundary between self and the other has successfully turned her into a traveler, who truly encounters the other.
Chapter Three, “Encountering the Other,” focuses on the foreigner question by elucidating Julia Kristeva’s idea of strangers to ourselves. Traveling is one of the
approaches that connects people from different parts of the world, and further leads to the issues on foreigners and strangers. Kristeva employs Sigmund Freud’s theory on the uncanny to point out the psychological conflicts that are aroused when a person encounters the strangers. Later on, Kristeva suggests that we should comprehend that foreignness is actually within us. By means of negotiating with the strangeness within us, we are able to extricate ourselves from psychological conflicts when we encounter the other. In this chapter, I attempt to have a close reading of New Anatomies and to explore the interrelationship between different characters. The inner struggle and conflicts within each individual, the social status and even gender difference all become possible factors that affect how one interacts with the other. The play points out the psychological conflicts between foreigners and the locals, and shows that such conflicts may lead to brutal confrontation if they are not properly coped with. How a person is able to cope with the psychological conflicts affects the way he/she treats the strangers. From the perspective of the locals, the attitude they adopt determines their decision on the practice of hostility or hospitality to the strangers that they face.
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Chapter Four, “Hospitality, Hostility, Hospitality,” proceeds with the discussion on the foreigner question along with the idea of hostility, and relates them with Jacques Derrida’s concept of hospitality. On the basis of the host-guest relationship, Derrida introduces two seemingly incompatible but dependent operations of hospitality, which are conditional hospitality and unconditional hospitality. In New Anatomies, the locals are theoretically the hosts in North Africa; however, the French government that invades North Africa has deprived the locals of their host position. In her voyage to North Africa, Isabelle witnesses both hospitality and hostility in the host-guest relationship, and the inversion of the relation as well. The relationship between the locals and Isabelle shows how the original host-guest relationship appears to be, and becomes a contrastive example when being compared with the inversed host-guest relationship between the locals and the colonizers. This chapter manifests how the host-guest relationship is inversed, and how the meanings of hospitality are deformed in the colonist context.
In Chapter Five, “Conclusion,” I endeavor to point out my central argument that
New Anatomies actually presents different concepts of hospitality that is generated in
certain intricate context.‧ 國
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Chapter Two
The Stranger on the Move
New Anatomies is a play concerning Isabelle Eberhardt’s traveling experience
written by Séverine the chronicler. Traveling is the central theme of the play, and it is the theme that leads to the problematic issue of the thesis, which is the concept of foreigners.In order to bring forth the concept of foreigners and to observe further question on hospitality, it is imperative to situate New Anatomies within a traveling context by examining its traveling features.
What is the concept of travel? Carmen Andraş traces the English word travel to its origin, which is French word “travail” and claims that the word is later on used to indicate “a tiresome journey-travel” (Andraş 161).3 In OED, one of the definitions on travail is “[b]odily or mental labour or toil, especially of a painful or oppressive nature;
exertion; trouble; hardship; suffering” ("travail, n.1."). Eric Leed agrees with the notion that traveling is originally associated with the idea of sufferings, but he goes on pointing out how the meanings of travel vary from the ancient time to the modern time. In Leed’s opinion, though traveling qualifies the travelers as “skilled” and “wise” people, it is
3 “In the past, travel was extremely painful and often unsafe. Indeed, the last source of the word ‘travel’ is a medieval instrument of torture – the trepalium – a mechanism would perforate its victim’s flesh with three pointed stakes (tres ‘three’ and palus ‘stake’). The trepalium became a verb, trepaliare, which meant any form of torture, from torture to the Old French concept of travailler – or ‘putting oneself to pain or trouble’. Travailler came to mean ‘work hard’ in French. English borrowed the word as ‘travail’ and this, in turn, was used to describe a tiresome journey-travel” (Andraş 161; emphasis in the original).
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definitely not a pleasurable experience in ancient time (Leed 7). Traveling, in modern sense, becomes “a pleasure” itself and “a means to pleasure” (5). Leed interprets that “the ancients most valued the journey as an explication of fate or necessity” while “for
moderns, it is an expression of freedom and an escape from necessity and purpose” (5).
Traveling suggests different meanings from time to time, and it is a recurrent theme that is being widely raised. Andraş views that “histories of civilizations are also histories of travels, mobilities, migrations, and their integration in new topographies” (159). It explains why theories on a relevant theme generate a wide range of discussion.