387 research outputs found
Authentic travel in an age of global tourism
No full textLooking at a handful of critical studies of travel writing, one will notice a recurrent feature of what is generally termed ‘modern’ travel writing. As always, exactly what constitutes the term ‘modern’ is contested as is the period of time it is supposed to cover. One fact, though, seems to be a commonly acknowledged characteristic of the genre. Namely that, as Ali Behdad’s put it in the title of Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (1994), the modern traveller, and hence the modern travel writer, is characterised by a sense of ‘belatedness’. In the words of James Duncan and Derek Gregory’s Writes of Passage: reading travel writing (1999), ‘the networks that made escape from home possible - railways and steamships, hotels and tour companies - ensured that modern tourism was constantly haunted by the spectre of belatedness, by the sense of arriving at the very moment that a non-modern world was fast disappearing under the impress of modernity’.As Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan argued it in their seminal study Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (1998), the ‘spectre of belatedness’, doggedly tagging the modern traveller as a constant reminder that it is too late, is as a result ‘one of the staples of modern travel writing’
Introduction - Desperately Seeking Authenticty: an Interdisciplinary Approach
No full textAuthenticity, we have been informed time and time again, should have died out long ago. Possibly with Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), but certainly with postmodernism and digitalization, gene technology, plastic surgery and virtual reality; what was felt with some regret by Benjamin three quarters of a century ago has been lamented a thousand fold over the past couple of decades. As the twentieth century neared its close, great minds repeatedly informed us that instead of simply reproducing the real through reproduction, ‘the real’ was now fabricated from scratch. The real had become a creation rather than a reproduction, no longer dependent on the imitation of an authentic original, but capable of producing closed and selfreferential systems
Rune Graulund on the desert setting
No full textCormac McCarthy's dystopic vision of a father and son's fraught journey to an unknown destination earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. McCarthy peoples his bleak landscapes with individuals forced to renegotiate their own moral borders. The sparsity of the author's style creates a lyric tension with the bleak imagery and graphic realities that are part of this postapocalyptic world. In this new volume, critical excerpts explore this contemporary classic, and features include an annotated bibliography, an index, a list of characters from the work, and extensive summary and analysis, making this entry in the Bloom's Guides series a valuable addition
Catrin Gersdorf - The poetics and politics of the desert : landscape and the construction of America
No full textRune Graulund reviews The poetics and politics of the desert: landscape and the construction of America by Catrin Gersdorf Catrin Gersdorf's study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes
Travelling home : global travel and the postcolonial in the travel writing of Pico Iyer
No full textChapter focusing on global travel and the postcolonial in the travel writing of Pico Iyer
Introduction - Postcolonial Travel Writing : Critical Explorations
No full textPostcolonial Travel Writing challenges prevailing notions of travel writing as intrinsically colonial and Eurocentric, exploring the works of writers including Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, V. S. Naipaul, Pico Iyer and Jan Morris as rich and fascinating examples of the genre. Featuring original interviews with William Dalrymple and Pankaj Mishra, this exciting collection by internationally recognized scholars in the field offers a comprehensive study of postcolonial travel writing, from literature and memoir to essays and travel histories. The volume stands as an innovative benchmark study of future inquiries into the field, and will spark a much-needed rethinking of this vibrant and volatile genre
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