4 results
96 - Vision
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- By Margaret Topping, Queen's University Belfast.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 283-285
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Summary
Definitions of the term ‘vision’ range from the physical to the perceptual, from the ‘action of seeing with the bodily eye’ to ‘a mental concept of a distinct or vivid kind; an object of mental contemplation, especially of an attractive or fantastic character’ (Oxford English Dictionary). A very modern travel phenomenon encompasses both definitions: the selfie offers a physical and a psychological image of the photographer/photographee, for the selfie is both material evidence of ‘having been there’ (Barthes 1977, 44) and the proof of cultural capital that marks out the cosmopolitan traveller. It is the ultimate multidirectional commodification of travel, not only framing a partial and often stereotyped vision of the travellee (or, more likely, iconic emblems of his/her culture), but also confirming the value of the traveller, both in the composition of the selfie and its synecdochic associations: thus, for example, if France = Paris = capital of culture = Louvre = Mona Lisa, then a selfie in front of the painting represents proof of cultural and economic capital. It is also increasingly a marker of social capital, given the instantaneous sharing of images allowed by social media and subsequent validation through likes and retweets.
The privileging of vision as the most reliable (and now, as the selfie example illustrates, most ‘valuable’) sense by which to mediate the encounter between the traveller and the world is a familiar trope of travel writing, while the relationship of sight to discourses of power and appropriation has also been well-established since the publication of Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes (1992). This cultural privileging of sight – or ocularcentrism (Jay 1994) – has implications for both visual and textual modes of recounting the experience of travel. The visual representation of travel in photography is, as suggested by the brief discussion of the selfie, implicated in discourses of power, capture and commodification, which themselves have their origins in the early use of photography as a literal tool of colonial expansion (Hight and Sampson 2004; and colonialism). But writers too grapple with the challenges, possibilities and limitations of a textual visualization of the experience of travel.
At one end of the spectrum, a writer such as French naval officer Pierre Loti (1850–1923) struggles to transcend the ‘déjà-vu’ or ‘déjà-lu’ associated with the exotic picturesqueor with conventional visual stereotypes.
95 - Virtual Travel
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- By Margaret Topping, Queen's University Belfast.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 280-282
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Summary
Since the first decade of this century, programmes such as ‘Second Life’ have associated the term ‘virtual’ with a ‘computerised or digitized simulation’ (www.etymonline. com). Yet, while the wish-fulfilment these technologies represent is already implicit in much earlier (fifteenth-century) uses of the term to denote ‘something in essence or effect, though not actually or in fact’, a step further back reveals fourteenth-century origins in the capacity to ‘influence by physical virtues or capabilities’ (from Latin virtus, literally ‘manliness, manhood’). This apparent tension between bodily experience/reality and its simulation is suggestive for a reflection on virtual travel, particularly in light of Rosi Braidotti's (2013, 3) diagnostic of the posthuman condition as one where ‘the boundaries between the categories of the natural and the cultural have been displaced and blurred by the effects of scientific and technological advances’. What does this mean for travel? Do these technologies offer the potential to experience everywhere, or nowhere? Does virtual travel herald democratic access to a diverse sense of place, or a beguiling placelessness whose very accessibility demands some ethical challenge?
Leisure travel is making increasing use of virtual technologies: tourist attractions offer 4D cinematic experiences which create an impression of time and place, while the promise of borderlessness is humorously explored in Gemma Bowes's (2007) article on the world's first virtual tour operator, ‘Synthtravels’:
I'm ambling along the beach. […] I follow a sign for a treehouse campsite and find a stylish open-air lodge, with verandas built up into the trees and bean bags and designer chairs round open fires. I recline for a while before Mario, my tour operator, says he wants to buy me some designer clothes before taking me skiing. Then he'll take me to see some historical sites and meet some celebrities.
At once enticing and troubling, such experiences ‘trick’ the audience into an impression of full sensory participation, an impression of embodied experience which is precisely the product of a disembodied, that is, virtual, world. The sociopolitical implications of this conundrum may not be far-reaching in a leisure context, and the ease of global, virtual travel at the click of a mouse is cause for celebration, but technology has advanced faster than human understanding of the ethical implications of using it.
Chapter 19 - Travel
- from ii. - Self and society
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- By Margaret Topping, Queen’s University Belfast
- Edited by Adam Watt, University of Exeter
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- Book:
- Marcel Proust in Context
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- 05 November 2013
- Print publication:
- 05 December 2013, pp 145-152
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Summary
The only real journey . . . would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others.
(5: 237; iii, 762)Banality is never in the world. It is always in the gaze.
The interconnectedness of space, place, modernity and desire in Proust has preoccupied critics from Georges Poulet to Sara Danius, but little attention has been granted to Proust's relationship to contemporary cultures of travel and to the theories of travel that evolved in the course of the twentieth century. Yet the striking overlap between his observation above and that of contemporary travel theorist, Jean-Didier Urbain, also establishes Proust as a time-traveller. In the period between Proust's and Urbain's aphoristic comments, writers as diverse as Georges Perec, Henri Michaux and cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss were, with differing inflections, pronouncing or implying ‘la fin des voyages’. With a sense of exhaustion of the possibilities of geographical exploration, each was calling for, or enacting, a form of virtual travel based on a freshness of perception, a willingness to see the world differently. As Urbain continues:
What is important is not whether (or not) the world is ‘washed of its exoticism’ [‘rincé de son exotisme’], but whether it might one day be perceived as such. Whether it is ‘washed’ or not, what is essential is surely to rid oneself of this disagreeable impression and to reinvent the exoticism of the world.
Chapter 18 - Religion
- from ii. - Self and society
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- By Margaret Topping, Queen’s University Belfast
- Edited by Adam Watt, University of Exeter
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- Book:
- Marcel Proust in Context
- Published online:
- 05 November 2013
- Print publication:
- 05 December 2013, pp 137-144
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Summary
A novel of crossings, frictions and fusions, the Recherche is also a site of productive aesthetic and moral tensions in its engagement with religion. Proust's own Catholic/Jewish heritage situates him at the intersection of different rituals, practices and beliefs, just as his historical context provided the stage for a turbulent clash between the two traditions. The Dreyfus Affair became the trigger for widespread anti-Semitic feeling, while also entrenching and intensifying a strand of right-wing Catholic thinking prevalent since the late nineteenth century. This was also a period of increased interest in Eastern religions and in alternative belief systems such as spiritualism, all of which leave their traces on the novel. Occupying a privileged, ‘in-between’ space afforded Proust some of the detachment of the quasi-ethnographic observer who considers religion as a means of cementing group identities, attributing value or establishing and maintaining principles of conduct. In addition, this ethnographer uses the lens of religious ritual in order to make sense of the secular. Yet the ethnographer's mask of objectivity also slips, most obviously in his portrayal of characters who are the self-professed embodiments of religious belief and/or those who are rejected by it.
Proust croyant?
Proust's personal correspondence offers a rich mine of references to religious belief that tempt us into pinning down his own faith (or lack thereof). Yet Proust's desire to comfort or connect with his addressee inflects his letters, such that evidence of belief here remains a tantalizing source of ‘frictions’. In a letter to Georges de Lauris in 1906, for instance, Proust asks ‘whether your mother was religious, found consolation in prayer. Life is so dreadful that all of us must turn to it’ (Corr, vi, 220); while a letter of 1908 urges Mme Straus: ‘In Heaven's name, not a word about any of this to Mme Ganderax. In Heaven's name . . . in which, alas, neither of us believes’ (Corr, viii, 278).