Examining the cosmopolitan gaze: Cosmopolitan in the selected travel essays from Elizabeth Reyes Islander and Alice Sun-Cua riding towards the sunrise

• Main Author: Lim, Symba Myrtle A.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2013
• Subjects: Comparative Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/2613
• Institution: De La Salle University

This thesis aims to study how travel writers Elizabeth Reyes and Alice Sun-Cua exhibit the cosmopolitan characteristics in their narratives. Thus, the concept of cosmopolitan will be used to analyze the selected essays chosen in the two writers respective collections. Writers with cosmopolitan vision, according to Debbie Lisle in her book the Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, celebrate the interdependence and common aims of all cultures (4) and that they appreciate cultural difference and recognize the values common to all of humanity (4) unlike the writers with colonial vision. Hence, the analysis will focus on determining whether the writers indeed possess a cosmopolitan vision through analyzing how they convey their experiences in the places they have been to, the way they describe the places and/or what they see, and finally how they express their opinions and views about the foreign people, culture and territory that they are in. It can also be deduced from here then if being a cosmopolitan or portraying the cosmopolitan attitude truly veers from the colonial subjectivity.