After yet another great discussion last night, I'm logging in to say thanks, and to post the prompt for next week.
After you find it and read it carefully, you should succinctly summarize
the narrative as best you can, highlighting how the text is both like and
unlike course texts (in 250 words or fewer), and then offer a short critical
analysis of the text that explains why you think it is important for us to
consider (a paragraph at most), all of which you will post here in the
comments.
Sounds simple, but
like before, this should involve
doing a bit of research, reading around to find the right text. As
you're doing this work, I'd highly recommend keeping a running list of the
sources you've consulted. I recommend this because you should think of this assignment
as an opportunity to continue working on your seminar paper.
Finally, you should prepare to sell your particular primary source to class with a tightly organized 3-minute
presentation (again, it's probably best if this doesn't involve technology, but if you want to
sing, dance, or otherwise make this presentation exciting, then by all means). My hope is that we'll not only have another annotated list of texts in the comments here, but that the
presentations will also remind us that there a lot of ways to approach the idea of travel.
Until next week, I leave you to contemplate this seasonally appropriate cover image from the Choose Your Own Adventure series.
May your warehouses be free of haunts,
Kevin
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ReplyDeleteTaking a leap away from the literary focus we have had, I looked at how photography influences the places people travel to.
ReplyDelete“Photography and travel brochures: The Circle of Representation” written by Olivia Jenkins. This article is about the idea that there is a ‘circle of representation’ that influences people to travel. The circle of representation refers to the images that are collectively projected and then consumed by the public. The public then visits and reproduces the pictures and brings them back home to show other people. The article looks specifically at backpackers and the travel brochure differences for backpackers and mass tourism. Jenkins points out that a backpackers motivation to travel is “meeting other travelers and local people, absorbing culture of a destination, as well as seeing and experiencing different environments” (309). Also looking at how the people look to escape work and seek new experiences. Similarly, travel brochures attempt to sell these ideas to the people, so that potential tourists become actual tourists. For backpackers, the travel brochure will sell pictures of natural landscapes with posed groups of people doing fun activities. Meanwhile, the travel brochures for tourists will show pictures of the accommodations and big name historic stops. These pictures attract the travelers, and they are also the pictures that travelers tend to take.
Photography is definitely a different approach to travel than the literary/theoretical approach that we have taken in class. I think that it has a lot to do with why people travel though. In the modern world, people will look at pictures more often than they will read someone’s description of a place. The pictures are what attract someone to a place. They are the reason that people travel, so that they can show others where they were and the memories that they had. Not surprisingly, there are different pictures (or texts) that will attract different groups of people. Similarly, people will take pictures in different ways of different things, but the themes are still there.
Lopez, Barry. “Orchids on the Volcanoes.” About this Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. 50-65. Print.
ReplyDelete“Orchids on the Volcanoes” is Barry Lopez’s account of his travels to the Galápagos archipelago. He describes some of the unique flora and fauna he encounters in the seascapes and landscapes, but also the scientific and historic atmosphere and the intellectual current meandering through the islands. The Galápagos represent a locus of biological thought, rich in the legacy of Charles Darwin and his insights. As a traveler, Lopez is gradually overpowered by the complex beauty and chaotic life on the islands. He is more than usually observant of the close variation in species, which provoked some of the first theories of island biogeography and adaptive radiation. But he also sees evidence of changes in ecology and extinctions, and directly witnesses the death of animals by predation - a startling realization of natural selection and of the conflict that defines life. Everything is changing and positions of power exist in an uncertain state of flux, lending an acute awareness “of the light hold the biological has on the slow, brutal upheaval of the geological” (58). Further, as a visitor Lopez must grapple with what the tourism industry has done to the Galápagos’ natural world as well as the difficulties the residents confront with a developing economy and erratic distribution of wealth.
Lopez’s essay highlights a (scientific) purpose of travel and explores the linkage of scientific understanding with travel literature. His writing analyzes the meaning of place and the ways in which travel has changed over time - key themes in our class discussions of travel thus far. There is also a serious reflection on tourism, and while Lopez has profound experiences and certainly leaves the Galápagos with a better understanding and appreciation of evolution and humanity’s place in it, he doesn’t necessarily set himself apart from any other traveler/tourist in that his being there has a potentially negative impact on the place.
Clampitt, Amy. "Westward". New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. Print.
ReplyDeleteThe landscape of the Midwestern United States is central to many of Amy Clampitt's poems collected in the book, "Westward," but she also ventures out into other areas of the U.S. in her work. She paints portaits of specific states like Ohio, California, and Virginia. She narrows her scope in other poems to focus in on towns like Iola, Kansas and natural features like the savannah. But Clampitt pushes back against the impulse to create a stable and whole image of place in her writing. Clampitt describes her sense of place in her poetry through images that are not static and confined to the landscape which she writes about. She allows herself to wander in her writing and break spatial boundaries. Clampitt creates landscapes out of fragments drawn from within and outside of the customary borders used to define place, bringing in both natural and man-made elements in her descriptions. She presents an account of the heartland of the U.S. that resists settlement and depicts a restless stirring across the continent. I think the final poem in this book, “Nothing Stays Put,” expresses a central theme in Clampitt’s writing; the last three lines read, “Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel. / All that we know, that we’re / made of, is motion” (77).
I think Clampitt’s work fits well with our class discussions of travel because she embraces in a nomadic sense of place her work, which challenges imperialistic modes of thought set on claiming territory and colonizing. She does not write as the early Alaskan tourists did, glossing over the glaciers and mountainous landscape as though it did not bear a history of its own. When Clampitt looks at landscape she views what can best be described as a web of societies and histories. Her vision of the world involves networks that cannot easily be arranged or structured for our own understanding. I think this idea of a nomadic sense of place is especially interesting given our conversations in class on topics like globalization and questions of “When does a traveler become a local?” During the first “Choose Your Own Adventure” class period, I was interested in exploring the ways in which travel poetry deconstructs and examines the Western understanding of cultural identity. I think Amy Clampitt’s work accomplishes this exact thing. I would like to continue to study her poetry in my final paper for the class. I may return to my secondary text, “Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry” as I continue to research poets that move away from traditional place-based writing.
Tony Hopfinger. 2007. To live and Die in Wale, Alaska. The Walrus 4 no9: 64-76.
ReplyDeleteI had plans to go in a very different direction this week, but when I found this article I couldn't stop reading it. It is about life in Wales after the 1918 flu epidemic. This epidemic killed over half the population of wales which at the time was one of the largest purely native towns. They lived their traditional lifestyle that revolved around the bowhead whale hunt. For half a century after the epidemic not a single whale was killed in the village for most of the major hunters were killed. The story is told through the life of a man names Mike. Mike was a second generation orphan of the flu epidemic who was adopted to a family and grew up in Wales. The culture struggled to return to the strength it once was at, but never recovered. Instead white men came to the village to try to fix things and spread their ways and pushed out the knowledge of the local people. Now, like many small villages in Alaska, Wales rought with alcohol and suicide. Mike in fact killed himself at the age of 26 after deciding he had nothing to share with the world having no escape from the lost culture left in Wales.
After the flu epidemic basically eradicated the traditional lifestyle in Wales people have spent the last century trying to find their way again. The few elders that survived the epidemic lived the rest of their lives hunting and trying to spread their knowledge, but with an out side world calling the yonger generation a little more is lost each time an elder is lost. This loss of purpose I feel can be seen on a much larger scale. It came up breifly last class, the idea that through travel we are searching for that purpose. Many of the villagers left in Wales longed for a life outside of Wales. Mike wanted to start a metal band in Seattle leave the scraps of life left in Wales. Unable to do this he instead just removed himself completely. In our modern culture were does purpose for life come from? Almost everything we need to survive is given to us and we become detached from our place of "being". I think the effects of this are so wide spread it is almost impossible to talk about, but in the context of ancient cultures and how they are being lost it is possible to observe the effects. 4 out of 5 members of Mikes graduating class dead before reaching the age of 30. All of which are confirmed or suspected suicides. What does this say about our growing culture and the one being left behind. Is there some part of the world and our relationship with it that we are blind to because it is no longer present in our everyday busy lives? Does travel fulfill our need to know about the land? I hope I am not just creating ideas here that are not all that helpful or relevant. It seams that the backpacking culture in todays youth and the traveling cultures in many other eras and age groups allows us to feel purpose again without actually having to establish and define ourselves in a single place.
The text I chose is "The Long Walk" by Slavomir Rawicz. I first thought of using this book after reading Wild, because it was another tale about an epic journey on foot. I remembered reading it in 7th grade, so I found it again. The Rawicz claims that the book is the true story of how he and 6 others escaped from a Soviet gulag in Siberia in 1941 and walked through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas, with 3 of them reaching British India in the winter of 1942.
ReplyDeleteWhile this is an incredible travel narrative in itself, even more interesting was what I found while researching this book and Rawicz (since I haven't thought about this book since 7th grade). There is a great deal of controversy regarding not only the authenticity of the story (some claim that it seems just too impossible) but also whether or not Rawicz even made the journey! There are theories that Rawicz hijacked the story from another Polish prisoner, Witold Gliński, and could not have been at certain places according to the timeline of the book. But there has been research that shows that Glinski couldn't have been there, either! Is the book a synthesis of experiences? Is it mostly true or mostly false? This book made me question the stories we tell in relation to travel and how we tell them. The stories about travel can change-who's stories do we take on? The consideration of these questions lead me to wonder about the function of travel in storytelling—in travel’s function in the novel and in poetry.The secondary text I’d chosen before focused on the “travel mania” of the 19th century and its ties to tourism and explored how travel is the root of many contemporary genres. How has travel functioned in various genres in history, and how has it influenced them? Maybe for my term paper, I could pick a genre or time period and explore the way travel is presented and its influences. I also am interested, regardless of the state of authenticity of this text, in the impact of travel on one’s self-particularly during forced relocations. This issue is one I really enjoyed exploring while reading Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, and how experiences are translated as WE are translated in travel.
Smith, Sidonie. "The Logic of Travel." Moving Lives: Twentieth-century Women's Travel Writing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2001. Print.
ReplyDeleteI pulled a section from the “Moving Lives : Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing” that I found particularly interesting and fitting for our class. Sidonie Smith talks about the early nineteenth century and women travel writers. Discussed in the short section of the book were the reasons that women in the nineteenth century set out on these travel “adventures”: some of the listed reasons being religious, familial, political, and professional. The main reason for their travel though was interesting, bourgeois constraints. This section focuses on how women of this time frame were trying to separate themselves from infantilizing bourgeois femininity. To do so, these women took their identities with them and started traveling. It was noted that cultural influences linked together with modernity led to this “new type of traveler”, a woman with some form of independence who was just as eager as man to expand her knowledge through travel and travel writing. An interesting point made in this reading was that “newly bourgeois “women benefited from Western expansion, becoming consumers of the items and materials that were brought back from these excursions. With these materials being brought back, it also brought wealth, as well as a new found interest in leisure activities. The discourse of democratic individualism had women reimagining themselves as “free” people, making them available and able to travel. Women that traveled during this time were viewed as “active agents” and they were learning for themselves about many different things. It was interesting to read that women who traveled wrote about how they wanted to “save” other women in these countries by converting them to their religion, educating them, and helping them to become more “civilized.” The justified this by saying that they were participating in modern progression. Women were not allowed to write about exotic or explicit narrative tropes, so often times they would keep these parts of their adventures out in order to keep her social respect. I found this particularly interesting because this is the complete opposite of what we read in class from Cheryl Strayed, who wrote such a raw and explicit recount of her adventure on the PCT. The conclusion of this section verified that travel writing women were able to “position themselves as credible, authoritative, and competent professionals.” Women travel writers were able to use their works as a way to re imagine themselves away from the constraining femininity they were exposed to at home.
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ReplyDeletePublished a short time after his death, Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs, retraces his roots as a railwayman’s son, a motherless child in the wild terrain of Temuco, Chile, a bohemian university student in Santiago, a Chilean consul who traveled to Burma, Java, Mexico, Spain, Singapore and beyond; a politician, lover and poet. And in his adult life, Memoirs reflects on Neruda’s role as a communist senator who was ousted from his political seat in 1948, forcing him to live underground for two years before escaping on horseback over the Chilean Andes to Argentina and remain exiled to places like Russia, Eastern Europe, and China for the greater part of a decade. Finally, in his twilight years, the survivor of the Chilean coup (ordered by Richard Nixon) that overthrew his confidant Salvador Allende.
ReplyDeleteA Nobel laureate for his rich poetry, his muses were nature, particularly his homeland, women, and the struggles of the people he met at home and on his travels. Though he counted many famous figures such as Picasso, Che Guavera, Ganghi, Mao, and Diego Rivera within his inner circle, as a true man of conscience, Neruda sought bonds with the land and people, particularly those who were oppressed. In his own words, "The poet cannot be afraid of the people. Life seemed to be handing me a warning and teaching me a lesson I would never forget: the lesson of hidden honor, of fraternity we know nothing about, of beauty that blossoms in the dark (p. 89).”
Memoirs both encapsulates and moves beyond our previous course readings this semester. It follows tropes such as coming-of-age in foreign lands, nature as the truest form of escape, political and economic migration, war and sex. What sets it apart is that the purveyor of these tropes is a single man, arguably, “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language (Gabriel Garcia-Marquez).”
Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
ReplyDeleteI decided to stick with what I had in terms of my last choose your own adventure and continue to focus on inherent privilege within travel. In response to Hemingway’s inherent privilege in Europe, I chose The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac to illustrate the privilege found in traveling the U.S. This is another semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical novel set not too long after On the Road. It also gives a look outside of Hemingway’s and Kerouac's previous novels wilderness of the city and as this book is set in the wilderness. Ray Smith (Kerouac) searches for a sense of being with Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder). It ultimately explores Kerouac’s Buddhism and the travel that got him there, as well as a way to emulate such a life.
Kerouac has his characters become Buddhists, such as he did, while misinterpreting the religion and teachings. He also gives the character stand in for himself a family that doesn’t understand the purpose of his revelation. He's forcing himself into a sense of exile that doesn't actually exist for him. “I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads,” (Jack Kerouac). He promotes the Grand Tour at home as a modern day pilgrimage, were people will go and find renewed sense of self. But he also was promoting an appropriated version of Buddhism along the way. Kerouac is traveling to mountains in an attempt of finding himself in the American wilderness, from the Sierra Nevada to Desolation Peak, traveling like On the Road but in a more ingrained wilderness.
As I am using it in comparison to Hemingway, we see a lot of similar things within their characters. The fighting with sobriety, displacement, and a need for ultimate belonging in a place.
The work which I selected for my critical text to theorize travel is the first essay from writer Amitava Kumar’s book Lunch With a Bigot, which I just read with Richard Simpson for our Allegory Course. This essay entitled Paper analyzes the ways in which not only the physical act of travel, but rather writing (as a noun) and reading (as a verb) itself offers a methodology for understanding and critiquing the world in its postmodern condition.
ReplyDeleteKumar argues that “the act of opening a book or entering a library also produces results akin to travel” (Kumar 7). Kumar describes a story of an Indian man who comes to the United States and “is amazed at how, unlike him, the American anthropologists knew so much about Indian culture” (Kumar 5). He visits the library at the University of Chicago and finds a section entirely on Indian literature.
Kumar describes how in the mid-twentith century, the US provided wheat to India, accepting payment in local currency which in turn was used to buy Indian books for American libraries, specifically the library at the University of Chicago. These international relations were part of the Green Revolution, of which Kumar states, “the social and political planning that went into the Green Revolution aimed at engineering not just seeds but social relations as well” (Kumar 6).
In this sense, the text provides a more radical understanding of the postmodern world than traveling the country of the texts origin does. It is not simply that one gains an understanding of another country by reading about it, but rather that the existence of the text reveals the social relations behind it, and between its origin and its later location. In this sense, the books which the individual Kumar describes finds, are the physical representation and reflection of the material conditions of global politics and the difference between material conditions in the different locations within those global relations. Kumar states, “libraries are haunted by the marketplace” (Kumar 12).
He concludes his essay by stating, “writers are caught in the contradictory tasks of building imaginary worlds that are removed from everyday life and, at the same time, establishing how the imagination is not detached from the quotidian world and very much a vital part of it. To realize the truth of this condition is to know that books not only offer refuge from the world, they also return you to it” (Kumar 13). In this way, the act of reading offers maybe a more robust travel analysis than the physical act of travel itself, as writing becomes the mediation between the global politics of space.
Jessika (Bambi) Caudy
ReplyDeleteEnglish 418
Kevin Maier
November 3, 2015
Authenticity of the Tourist
I chose MacCannell’s article discussing staged authenticity as it relates to travel. In brief, he explains that tourists seek out places that are seemingly off the beaten path in order to feel as though they are more connected with the place they are traveling in. The issue is that these secret destinations are staged to feel more authentic, thus enhancing the false sense of place when traveling. Tourists are pulled from one false reality filled with shops and keychains into another false reality consisting of overinflated cultural ideas and too-genuine-to-be-real experiences. MacCannell distinguishes “front” and “back” regions when discussing travel. “Front” regions are the stereotypical interactions/places that tourists experience when venturing somewhere new. This may include monument destinations, popular restaurants, carnivals, and shopping centers. “Back” regions are places that tourists aspire to be involved in. These include the backstage area of a show or the local hangout spot. In short, “front” regions are perceived as fake while “back” regions are perceived as authentic and genuine. The trick here is, however, that in the grand scheme of things, both “front” and “back” regions in the tourist world are staged to give the illusion of being connected with place.
MacCannell asserts that the all too touristy need to not be a tourist is a testament to the innate need for something sacred. Humans travel in order to gain a sense of place and be connected with the world on a larger scale. Travel offers a religious sense of being in that the tourist comes to realize his place in the grand scheme of things. It is for this reason that he wants his experience to be genuine and not commercial.
MacCannell’s essays on the theories of travel and how authenticity relates to sense of place are important for us to consider because a major theme we continuously come back to is the idea that travel changes our perception of the world. What happens, then, when we discover that even the most intimate experience we had, the most sacred and individualistic moment of our travel, was staged? Does that still mean we changed as a person? Is our change fake? How can we determine if someone has genuinely “found themselves” through travel, if we understand that the commercial aspects of travel supersede all else? Perhaps the implication for this idea that concerns me is that if everyone essentially has the same traveling experience, everyone has been changing in the same way. This would indicate that our world is not growing more connected through cultural understanding, but rather we are becoming homogenous in our experience and our way of thinking.
MacCannell, D. (1973). Staged authenticity: Arrangements of social space in tourist settings. American Journal of Sociology, 79, 589-603.
I'm not sure whether or not this will be one of my more primary or secondary texts - I'm leaning more towards secondary - but I really wanted to incorporate something from Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days in my seminar paper. This book is certainly a good deal more flagrantly fictional than other things we've read in class, but I think that it does a good job of capturing what I would like the theme of my final paper to be about - which is that, yes, traveling is fun and great, but it's also fast-paced and not everyone is great at it and so many different things can go wrong. The premise of the book, if you are unfamilar, is that a man named Phileas Fogg is dared (in 1872) to circumvent the globe in 80 days, using the modern travel technology and conventions of the time. The book follows the various adventures and misadventures of Fogg and his new valet, Passepartout, as they attempt to win the wager.
ReplyDeleteNow, I recognize that this is not the most academic of texts I could have chosen, but I think that it's a great book to reference in my paper or even to use as a primary topic and comparison source for my paper. I think I could easily relate many of the topics we've discussed in this class to 80 Days - the idea of the Grand Tour, the " what white people like" parody we read back in the very beginning of the class, and even Jack London and Ernest Hemingway's books with their themes of "here vs. there." The book provides dated but, I believe, still accurate images of how a wealthier person travels, which I could contrast with the ways in which less wealthy people travel and visit locations (in fact, the entire premise of the book hearkens back to one of the underlying class topics that continues to come up, which is tourism vs. a more "authentic" way of viewing the world).
Basically, for my final paper I would really like to get into a deeper discussion of why I think traveling can be awful and stressful (as opposed to the dreamlike ideal that we so often read about in travel writing), but also how the travel habits of today can be compared and contrasted with those of the past. I think Around the World in 80 Days is a good book to use to draw examples from, and also to take those examples and use them as a reference point from which to discuss various other class readings.
“George Eliot and the Idea of Travel” by John Rignall is a short analysis of Mary Ann Evans’ (whose pen name was George Eliot) novels as they pertain to her traveling experience. Eliot made many trips across the continents, exploring great cites and traveling to her hearts content, but she never wrote a novel about her adventures. Barbara Hardy says about Eliot: “The life and the writing took different roads… a need for foreignness was an essential component of the novelist’s creative life”, despite this, there is no obvious foreign connections in all but her last work save “spots of foreignness” present. Most of her novels focus on the “inner landscape” of human history and private life. Despite her lack of travel writing narrative, Eliot kept journals of her travels, which were published following her death. This indicates that travel was a personal matter for her – she believed that travel contributed to self-culture. She dabbles with self-culture in gender throughout many of her novels, allowing females a harder time in understanding their place and identity. Eliot believed that travel writing had a sort of ethical potential – it could either allow the traveler to gain insight or ruin. Towards the end of her novelist career, she used travel as a way to suspend modern ways and allow history to fade into myth.
ReplyDeleteThis text is similar to many of the course texts in that it played with theoretical concepts of travel and writing, but was different due to its analysis of a certain author versus a discussion of theory or a descriptive travel story.
This piece of writing is important because it illustrates how an author may choose to use or not use personal travel experiences and tropes in their works, and discusses some travel devices that have already been touched upon in class, such as the difference between men and women while traveling. Using this particular concept as an example, Eliot uses the gender trope to accentuate how travel can be used for self-discovery, but also for destruction of identity – in situations often uncontrolled by the character who is subjected to the displacement of place, which we briefly talked about in class with concerns to migrant workers and religious outcasts. The text also reflects upon many of George Eliot’s novels and journals, which may also contain interesting content.
My text is from The Dall Sheep Dinner Guest: Inupiaq Narrative of Northwest Alaska, edited by Wanni Anderson, the story if Qayaqtuaginnaqtuaq: The Qayaq Cycle, told by Nora Paniikaaluk Norton. Paniikaaluk learned the story from her husband, Edward Norton. Nora Paniikaaluk was a master storyteller. She frequently comments that she wished she listened more closely to her husband, but she knew plenty. Moreover, her style is gentle, exact, detailed, a great contribution to oral literature by an Inupiaq woman. The Qayaq, sometimes called the Epic of Qayaq or Qayaq the Magic Traveller, is a very long cycle of stories where the main protaganist, Qayaq, travels throughout the Arctic, meeting various People, many who are actually birds and other animals of the land and sea, and inventing important traditions for the people. The story is a delightful dance along the edges of contact between the human and natural world, which is not nearly as divided as it is in the Western world. By listening to the story, we are thrust into the consciousness of nature, the particular ecosystems of the Arctic, and all of its history, whatever knowledge, perception and understanding human beings culled from it over many thousands of years. It is a document of a long and rich relationship between human beings and the natural world.
ReplyDeleteNora’s story is the longest extant document of the Qayaq Cycle. It is also brilliantly told. If that’s not enough to excite interest, to draw in people who want to know more, to want to understand and breath with the land, to intermingle and cohabit with the world, then I have nothing else to suggest. It’s a great story and it’s right under our noses, pulsing under our feet.
So I will start off with saying that this assignment was actually more complicated for me. As it turned into a research session as I gathered sources for my end of term paper and read many different abstracts. So choosing just one to focus on for tonight's class proved slightly difficult.
ReplyDeleteFor my final paper I want to take a look at those who intertwine tourism and work, bouncing between seasonal jobs and moving on to the next destination. So for tonight’s class I chose a critical analysis article from the International Journal of Tourism Research.
Uriely, N. (2001). 'Travelling workers' and 'working tourists': Variations across the interaction between work and tourism. The International Journal of Tourism Research, 3(1), 1.
The article starts out identifying the definition of a tourist or tourism from the official World Tourism Organization, in order to include people who travel for business or professional purposes. Uriely goes on to state that the relationship between work and tourism has not been officially recognized as something that requires further research or conceptual work.
Uriely includes an interesting quote from another author, Pape, published in 1965, in reference to the term that he coined ‘touristry’…as ‘a form of journeying that depends upon occupation, but only in a secondary sense in that it serves the most primary goal, the travel itself’.
It must be pointed out that Uriely goes on to say that there is a massive difference between ‘Travelling workers’ and ‘working tourists’, the former being the worker who is required to travel for their job and take advantage of the sightseeing opportunities, while the latter is the one who seeks the job with the destination being the pull of it. There is also the term ‘migrant tourism worker’ which identifies those who do travel for seasonal work, the difference from the ‘traveling worker’ being that they comprise the local tourism economy at their current location rather than their place of origin.
Uriely’s article is primarily theoretical and conceptual, taking a look at the types of ‘tourism’ and ‘work’ and how they can be intertwined for the enjoyment of the individual.
Earl, McKenzie. "Journeys in Poetry, Painting and Philosophy." Caribbean Quarterly 58.4 (2012): 50-61. Web. 3 Nov. 2015.
ReplyDelete“Journeys in Poetry, Painting and Philosophy” by Earl McKenzie looks at the philosophical journey that one takes through the writing or reading of poetry and the painting or experiencing of art. He gives the reader insight in to his own works speaking to soteriology, discussing that through the journey to becoming a better of person, one finds themselves saved. McKenzie argues that “It is possible and desirable to move from one unsatisfactory state of consciousness to a more satisfactory one.” He argues that this is mainly possible through the pursuit of poetry and art (in his case painting). He speaks on the transitional betterment of a person often being referred to by the metaphor of a journey. He speaks in to this by referencing popular works of literal travel for metaphorical betterment, such as Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Farid Ud-Din Attar’s “The Conference of the Birds.” McKenzie’s main argument is that through the day to day journeys of life, one can attain spiritual and personal betterment by experiencing poems or other forms of art that can transport the mind to a more desirable location.
This text itself wasn’t a primary text, but more a secondary one in the standards of literature. I feel as though, however, that I would like to take a closer look on this idea in my final seminar paper. I like the idea that travel doesn’t necessarily have to be literal for a work to be considered travel literature. I think the topic of my seminar paper will be mainly discussing poetry as a form of travel literature, both in the literal and metaphorical; as well as art being the main focus for travel.