Essays in estrangement : travelers, immigrants, inmates /

"Informed by feminist psychoanalytic theory," this book addresses the discovery of self in bodies that have been "gendered or sexed (or) raced." Bartkowski (Rutgers Univ.) hopes to "create a mosaic of discoveries" wherein the reader will "see mirrored certain structural repetitions in the construction of identities." This mosaic is that of the traveler, appropriate in that the journey motif must be the oldest and most profound of all of metaphors for the human condition. The modern traveler must confront and recount cultural, racial, gender, and political dislocations ("essays in estrangement") that manifest the construction of a self. The traveler in search of the exotic, the immigrant who (to the self at least) feels compelled to experience the "other," and the inmate in the context of the Holocaust: each is a wayfarer experiencing wonder, shame, and sometimes horror in the unfolding of the self. Bartkowski's methodology involves detailed introductions and running commentaries on chosen texts. The immigrants section, for example, includes writings of black (Hurston), Chicana (Cisnero), and Jewish (Hoffman) women who experience both wonder and shame "immigrating" to different America. These writers, like those discussed in the other sections, "provide a textual unfolding of the relation between wonder and shame." A difficult but interesting postmodern approach to an (emerging) psychogenre of travel writing. Upper-division undergraduates and above. E. J. Zimmermann; Canisius College