Introduction: On the Concept of Journeying
Abstract
The plethora of existing concepts of journeying, as explored by the authors of articles collected in the present issue of RIAS, reveals the multifaceted nature of travel, irreducible to physical mobility alone. Despite their differences, all forms of travel share common elements, including leaving home, facing risks, stepping out of comfort zones, and encountering logistical challenges, which renders journeying a significant component of existential experience. Involving aporetic encounters with the unfamiliar, travels allow for the deconstruction of stereotypes, offering not only opportunities for the revision of ossified perspectives, but also opening space for philosophical self-exploration. Literature and visual culture throughout different eras have captured these insights, from travel diaries and reports to cartographic works, paintings, photographs, and modern digital media such as travel vlogs and virtual reality. These records reflect the multidimensionality of the “truth” of their times, testifying to the material reality of a given time and place, but also revealing cultural prejudices and the particularities of the dominant discourse of the time. The authors of the texts in this volume reconstruct historical worlds, uncovering new aspects of literature and cultural artifacts, and offering fresh perspectives on travel and journeys as depicted in literary and visual narratives of the Americas since the Spanish Conquest until the first decades of the 21st-century.
Keywords
RIAS; introduction; journey; travel; travel writing; the Americas; media; narratives; images; identity
University of Silesia in Katowice Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5302-8010
Beata Gontarz is an Associate Professor and Director of the Institute of Culture Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Her areas of interest include discourses of personal documents, the correspondence between literature and visual arts, representations of individual and group experiences of history, identity discourse in individual and collective perspectives, and the axiological aspects of modern culture.
Selected publications:
- Jan Józef Szczepański’s Questions about the Meaning of Faith. Based on Dziennik (Journal). “Sensus Historiae” 2020, no. 3, pp. 97-111.
- Krytyka kultury w PRL-u. Na podstawie „Dziennika” Jana Józefa Szczepańskiego [Culture criticism in the People’s Republic of Poland. On the basis of Jan Józef Szczepański’s “Diary”], In: PRL-owskie re-sentymenty, eds.: Alicja Kisielewska, Monika Kostaszuk-Romanowska, Andrzej Kisielewski. Wydawnictwo Naukowe Katedra, Gdańsk 2017, pp. 149-167.
- Obrazy świata. Wizualne reprezentacje rzeczywistości w polskiej prozie współczesnej [Images of the world. Visual representations of reality in modern Polish prose]. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2014, 320 pages. ISBN 978-83-8012-052-5.
- Literackie reprezentacje historii. Świadectwa – mediatyzacje – eksploracje [Literary representations of history. Testimony — mediatization — exploration] [co-authors: Aleksandra Dębska-Kossakowska, Monika Wiszniowska]. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2013, 261 pages. ISBN 978-83-226-2255-1.
- W poszukiwaniu tożsamości – współczesna polska saga rodzinna [In search of identity — a modern Polish family saga]. In: Ku antropologii rodziny, ed. and introd. by Lucyna Rożek. Wydawnictwo Akademii Jana Długosza, Częstochowa 2009, pp. 51–67.
University of Silesia in Katowice Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3958-267X
Anna Maj, D.Litt., Ph.D., is a cultural and media studies expert and communicologist. She is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, and the Past Vice-Director of the Institute (2012–2019). Her main research interests include new media, cyber arts, cultural aspects of the AI, media anthropology, digital memory, communication behaviors in new media, perception theory & user experience, as well as travel narratives and their perceptions. She is the author of two monographs (Media in Travel and Transformations of Knowledge in Cyberculture) and numerous scholarly articles. To date, she has edited nine multi-author monographs on new media communication, digital art, and digital memories (published, respectively, by Brill, Leiden; Rodopi, Amsterdam–New York; and Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford). She served as a Member of the CULTMEDIA Academic Board (2022–2023), as a Steering Group Member and Project Leader at Inter-Disciplinary Net (Oxford) (2008–2016), and as an ENABLE Network Member (2012–2013). Additionally, she worked as a Katowice Project Team Member for the ECC 2016 contest, and held the function of the Project Leader responsible for the organization of multiple conferences on new media, art, and technology, including the New Media Days in Katowice, Digital Arts at Oxford University, and recently, in 2023, the New Media Perspectives at the Silesian Museum, University of Silesia, and Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice.
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