The cinematic in the travel narratives of John Dos Passos and Graham Greene

Abstract

The aim of my dissertation is to analyze a relationship between travel narratives and film. The study utilizes the formalist approach and focuses on literary travelers John Dos Passos (1896-1970) and Graham Greene (1904-1991), who traveled between the 1920s and 1960s publishing narratives based on their peregrinations. I apply close reading and analysis to Dos Passos's Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), Orient Express (1927), In All Countries (1934), Brazil on the Move (1963), and Easter Island: Island of Enigmas (1971); and, Graham Greene's Journey without Maps (1935) and The Lawless Roads (1938). I propose first, that the cinema impacts the way Dos Passos and Greene look at and record the world; second, that their assemblages of cinematic visual and aural sequences deepen a reader's perception of space, loosening the reader's identification with the protagonist; and third, that a focus on space helps change the reader into a cinematic spectator who develops an experience that is the spectator's alone freed from the experience of the protagonist to form what Evelyn Waugh considers a unique form of narrative that the cinema contributes to literature. Briefly, in Chapter 1, my dissertation provides a review of the scholarship on travel writing literature and includes a review of the studies done on Dos Passos and Greene in terms of their relationship with film. Chapter 2 focuses on the visual cinematic devices found in the travel narratives, while Chapter 3 addresses the aural devices. Chapter 4 concludes the study with a discussion on the significance of the cinematic and their implications in travel narratives.