"The practice of travel is oriented in two distinct directions from the 19th century: on the one hand, the voyage of scientific exploration, which brings together naturalists, astronomers, geologists and cartographers, no longer to discover new lands, but to carry out surveys and advance knowledge of the territories, the fauna and flora; on the other, the literary and artistic journey, where the subjectivity of the observer takes precedence. Yet it is not uncommon for artists to join voyages of scientific exploration, and the Humboldtian dream of uniting science and aesthetics is shared by many writers. The autonomy of the disciplines is far from having interrupted the dialogue between science, art and literature, so that it is appropriate to question both the place of science in the literary and artistic journey, and the place of aesthetics in the scientific travelogue.th century, thanks to multiple exchanges with the humanities and the natural sciences, the exploration of writers willingly taking the form of investigation and distanced play with the codes of scholarly travel. A similar movement took hold of photography, according to a specific temporality: from its advent in the 19th century, this medium is used during scientific missions , the shots being reproduced in the form of albums or typologies - not without betraying methodological presuppositions, scientific imaginations and logics of mastery and domination. Today (particularly since the last quarter of the twentieth century), photographers or artists are returning to these uses, which they partly take up, while distinguishing themselves from them. The replica or the borrowing of certain ways of doing sign both the desire to reconnect with a thirst for knowledge of the world, and the aspiration to freer, even fanciful forms of inquiry, giving rise to epistemological questions." -- Publisher's website.
Series:
La Revue des lettres modernes. Lire et voir ; 7 Numéro de la Revue des lettres modernes ; 2022 n-10.
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