Distant Episodes: A Briefing On Travels Mythic and Mundane

Advances in technology, while improving the conditions and modes of travel, have not obviated its dangers or reduced the mythical content and potential of travel experience. The present essay attempts a provisional survey of foreign travel as a recurring motif in the history of consciousness and as a mythically redolent theme in literature, film, and other forms of expression. Critical exposition, however brief, will be devoted to travel episodes of American, European, and Asian origin. The approach of this study is primarily philosophical insofar as the sources for its guiding argument are to be found in the works of Hans Blumenberg and Lezek Kolakowski, philosophers of myth whose research is not as well known to the general academic community as is perhaps warranted by their rigor and cultural pertinence.