Travelling Without Moving: Navigating the Liminal Space between Memoir and Fiction.

Travel writing; Memoirs; Autobiography; Fiction; Narratology

Contemporary travel literature provides many examples of the ways in which writers navigate the liminal space between memoir and fiction. Damon Galgut's Man Booker Prize-shortlisted In a Strange Room: Three Journeys, Robert Dessaix's Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives and Gao Xingjian's Nobel Prize-winning Soul Mountain challenge readers to question the boundaries of genre and reassess the importance placed on the separation of fact from fiction. In this paper, I examine the process of creating my own autobiographically-inspired travel narrative, Travelling Without Moving, which is poised in this same complex, delicate and problematic space. I consider narratology and the portrayal of emotional truth, the rhetorical shift from reportage to lyricism, and the paradoxical protecting and exposing of oneself. As a component of my practice-based PhD thesis, my creative work explores the primal psychological trauma of travel and questions whether travel can affectively transform us, which remains a point of contention between Emerson, Thoreau and their contemporaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]