Abstract
My essay brings into focus the ways in which Petru Comarnescu – the first Romanian Americanist – depicted the Los Angeles of the late 1920s, and it shows that his cultural encounter triggered both processes of representation and of misrepresentation, giving rise to varying cultural constructions of place. This is tied to the fact that making the new and unfamiliar meaningful presupposes a continuous process of ‘translation’ laden with approximations, misconceptions, distortions, half-truths, and varying authenticities. When Comarnescu sought to pin down otherness, it was the familiar which resurfaced, and the cultural heritage of the place left behind ‘taught’ the traveler what and how to see. In doing so, travel writings could best exemplify that cultural boundaries are fluid and permanently drawn and redefined.
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©2016 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- “Space, Place, and Narrative”: A Short Introduction
- Articles
- Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling
- Narrating the Contested Space of Detroit’s River Rouge, 1600–2015
- A(t) Home on the Frontier: Place, Narrative, and Material Culture in Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham
- The Cathedral of Nature: Sullivan’s and Adler’s Auditorium Building and the Narrative Function of Architecture
- “The Americans are Rumored to be Eccentrics”: On Los Angeles through the Romanian Cultural Lens
- Space, Place, Narrative: Critical Regionalism and the Idea of Home in a Global Age
- Book Reviews
- Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s
- Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur
- The American Novel of War: A Critical Analysis and Classification System
- Books Received
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- “Space, Place, and Narrative”: A Short Introduction
- Articles
- Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling
- Narrating the Contested Space of Detroit’s River Rouge, 1600–2015
- A(t) Home on the Frontier: Place, Narrative, and Material Culture in Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham
- The Cathedral of Nature: Sullivan’s and Adler’s Auditorium Building and the Narrative Function of Architecture
- “The Americans are Rumored to be Eccentrics”: On Los Angeles through the Romanian Cultural Lens
- Space, Place, Narrative: Critical Regionalism and the Idea of Home in a Global Age
- Book Reviews
- Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s
- Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur
- The American Novel of War: A Critical Analysis and Classification System
- Books Received