Travel Writing And Spiritual Transcendence

Abstract

This thesis explores inner and spiritual voyages deeply rooted in any outward physical quest, and seeks to examine the meditative observation to the external world in relation to the internal world found in Travel Literature. It is divided to three chapters, the first one is concerned with discussing definition of some theories concerned with travel writing, the second and the third are related to analyzing the case studies. This paper firstly discovers this literary genre through travel as a refer to Environmental Psychology and a mean of Cognitive Flexibility to increase creativity. It also studies Travel and Travel Writing not only from a psycho-sociological perspective, but also deepens it depth through the philosophical movement of Transcendentalism as a way of going beyond the old perspectives and paradigms of literature, philosophy and politics to take to rest on the premises that the focus on the individual is part of travel writing and transcendentalism. It also proposes to put in this category novels rely on trips and whose characters widely travel in the course of narrative, and the other assumption that it should be added to the curriculum of students. In This thesis we encircle the broad range of travel novels, including the hiking travel novels of Jon Krakauer “Into The Wild”, and Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild”, they are respectively chosen for sense of individualism, to rely on oneself and go through the inner work of searching for finding the truth. The two stories are chosen because they are real, and they depict individual struggles from the female view of Strayed, and male view of Chris McCandless, to stick to the point of enhancing both outer and inner knowledge, through Alienating from the inner fictional inabilities.