Travel Writers Online

Proust in Brittany Marcel Proust was born just weeks after the Paris Commune in the summer of 1871. His life reaches into the twentieth century and through the First World War.  Born into one of the successful bourgeois families that emerged from the revolutions in France, his documented life and his own novels present readers with a leisured social class in which a young man could choose to become a writer.  His narrating character in his major novel, À la Recherche du temps perdu (published over the period 1913-1927), is called the young Marcel, and with Proust's declared intent to scientifically investigate personal memory, the volumes of À la Recherche hover between fiction and autobiography.  Actual key figures from the time are mentioned in his novel, for example, Viollet-le-Duc, renovator of Notre-Dame cathedral. This further connects the narrative with the real history of this era.   Even though Proust's own critical writing challenged nineteenth-century...

Is literary tourism a phenomenon that can be experienced?  The novelist, Marcel Proust, expresses the effect that literary texts have upon places in the minds of certain readers in his most famous novel. Just a note before you plunge in, Bergotte was Proust’s character whom he based on the Nobel laureate, Anatole France: Going to the Champs-Élysées Garden was unbearable for me.  If only Bergotte had described it in one of his novels, I would probably have wanted to get to know it, like all those things whose 'double' had been planted in my imagination.  Description warmed the things, made them live, gave them a personality, and I wanted to find them again in reality; but in this public garden nothing was attached to my dreams. (Proust)   Aller aux Champs-Élysées me fut insupportable. Si seulement Bergotte les eût décrits dans un de ses livres, sans doute j’aurais désiré de les connaître, comme toutes les choses dont on avait commencé par mettre le « double » d...

Fieldwork for Literary Travel Writers Exploring theory to improve fieldwork Salazar (2011) looks within cultural production to investigate regulation and power relations.  His motivation is that a failure by the DMO and tourism scholars to understand how imaginaries are embedded within powerful institutions, for example, the state and local government, results in a loss of the development of new tourism practices (Salazar 2011).  He shows that imaginaries can be studied even though their workings are hidden (Salazar 2011) by developing a research methodology derived from ethno-methodology which uses field-notes in a very similar method to Edgar Morin's work on Brittany (Morin 2013).  Salazar presents what he calls, ethnographic examples.  These are short narrative sketches of encounters between a local tourist guide and the tourists to whom he is providing a service (Salazar 2011).  Neither Salazar nor his research fieldworker appears in the sketch, not even as ...