Writing the Camino: First-Person Narratives of the Camino de Santiago, 1985-2009.

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, the Camino de Santiago, a medieval pilgrimage that crosses northern Spain, has been experiencing a revival. During this time, thousands of pilgrims have been walking and biking the trail while public and private entities have been reforming old and creating new infrastructure to support them. Along with this reemergence, pilgrims have published a number of first-person narratives recounting their journeys. This dissertation examines these stories from 1985-2009, including narratives such as Elyn Aviva’s Following the Milky Way: A Pilgrimage across Spain (1989) and Lee Hoiancki’s El Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela (1996).

Previous research has dealt with these narratives as lived experiences. This dissertation reads these books as literature rather than as unmediated texts. Thus, I draw attention to the highly mediated nature of these narratives influenced by previous Camino narratives, both old and new, and the genre of travel literature as a whole. Furthermore, reading these stories through the theoretical lenses of Victor Turner’s communitas and Benedict Anderson’s imagined community reveals an ongoing relationship between the singular and collective. Each chapter isolates an aspect of these narratives, such as the use of embedded texts, diary writing and the modes of transportation, to highlight how this tension emerges. Together these chapters support my claim that in this postmodern world, it is no longer the bones of St. James that these people seek, but rather the opportunity to imagine themselves as unique individuals, while searching for a sense of belonging.