Tourist Literature and the Architecture of Travel in Olga Tokarczuk and Patti Smith

This chapter analyses two travel narratives within the scope of literature and tourism studies, aiming to explore the motivations to undertake journeying and the experience of (literary) pilgrims. The first is the novel Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk (2007), and the second is “How the Mind Works,” by Patti Smith (2017). This chapter defines the umbrella concept of “tourist literature” and takes a cross-disciplinary perspective combining the hermeneutics process with findings from the literature review on tourism studies. The analysis of Flights reveals the touring identity and experience of a pilgrim and reflections about airports, travel guides, tourists, and their syndromes. The analysis of Patti Smith's short story uncovers the touring identity and experience of a literary pilgrim who is strongly motivated to undertake literary-inspired trips towards the authors' places.

Topique du cannibalisme et ensauvagement de l’Africain dans les discours européens

In descriptions of European travel narratives since the 16th century, representations of the African are indistinguishable from those of other "savages" whose newly discovered lives both fascinate and repel. In the 18th century, even as allusions to New World cannibalism tended to dissipate, and the image of the "good savage" developed, the cannibalistic discourse on Africa continued to expand. This work proposes to observe how it emerges and spreads in European texts. In other words, the formation of this discourse on the other will be questionned in order to perhaps understand how it became fixated on the African: imaginary discourse, no doubt, but whose contagion still contaminates today’s perception of Blackness as otherness, and informs the persistent discourse of his perceived wildness.

Mapping Travel

More often than not, readers of travel narratives expect to find one or several maps showing, as English privateer William Dampier wrote, “the Course of the Voyage,” that is, where the author-traveler went and, implicitly, a sense of what was seen and experienced. Dampier used a now-common cartographic strategy to tell the story from beginning to end as well as focus on significant places on the way by marking the journey with a “pricked” line. Despite the lines’ popularity and present ubiquity, the complex intellectual processes of considering travel as a continuum rather than as a series of stops and of plotting a journey onto a map have attracted relatively little academic attention. Drawing on a thousand years of European travel writing and map-making, this work suggests that in fifteenth-century Europe, maps joined text-based itineraries and on-the-spot directions to guide travelers and accompany reports of land and sea travel. Called in subsequent centuries “route maps,” “itinerary maps,” and “travel maps,” often interchangeably, what are defined here as journey maps added lines of travel. Since their emergence, most journey maps have taken one of two forms: itinerary maps, which connected stages with line segments, and route maps, which tracked unbroken lines between endpoints. In the seventeenth century, journey mapping conventions were codified and incorporated into travel writing and other genres that represented individual travel. With each succeeding generation, journey maps have become increasingly common and complex, responding to changes in forms of transportation, such as air and motor car “flight” and print technology, especially the advent of multi-color printing.

American Claimants

This chapter examines descriptions of the British Museum in travel narratives and diaries by American travelers to show how it informed broader conversations about the development of American museums. Visiting during the mid-nineteenth century, American tourists encountered a museum that was attempting to organize its collections and define its purpose as a public museum, and their descriptions highlight the anxieties raised by this process. Nathaniel Hawthorne lamented the museum’s vast quantities of objects, linking a fruitless search for meaningful artifacts to questions of genealogy. Other American travelers more explicitly considered the role of visitors in interpreting collections. The artist Orra White Hitchcock reflected on the place of women in the museum’s galleries, while the Black abolitionist William Wells Brown celebrated the opportunity to continue his education and to participate in critical discussions of the museum.

Introduction

The introduction highlights the changes and transitions that accompanied the development of museums in the early nineteenth century. Tracing ideas about “useful knowledge” from cabinets and lyceums to museums and galleries, the introduction explores competing ideas about the scope and purpose of museum collections during this period. The discussions that surrounded museums in travel narratives, fiction, and periodicals reveal the unpredictable and imaginative reflections evoked by their collections, as writers and visitors frequently saw opportunities to consider how objects were preserved, classified, and displayed. Much like the books, specimens, and artifacts housed together in museum collections, these debates crossed fields and disciplines, raising broader questions about the role of museums in determining what counts as “useful knowledge” and who participates in the conversation.

Mapping Cicero’s Letters

Micah Myers describes the project ‘Mapping Cicero’s Letters: Digital Visualizations in the Liberal Arts Classroom’: A team comprising of classics faculty member, instructional technologists, and undergraduate students create digital visualizations of ancient Mediterranean travel narratives and investigate them as reflections of the geospatial and travel-related conceptions of ancient authors and audiences. The project therefore represents an ideal combination of content and method: its primary learning aims are increased student facility with tabular data, data visualization, ancient Mediterranean geography and travel, and late Republican Roman history.