Travel Writers Online

Imagining Tourists and Tourism Conference - Paris 19-21 June 2024 Aims of the Conference The conference aims to explore the links between tourism and fiction, and more precisely to consider tourism and tourists as fictions. It is part of a series of conferences organized since 2011 by researchers from the Universities of Geneva, Panthéon-Sorbonne and Berkeley to explore the links between tourism and the imaginary. The first four meetings had evoked how tourism mobilized imaginaries specific to destination countries, their landscapes, their cultures and their inhabitants. The fifth conference will focus on the imaginary that applies to tourists themselves. Imaginary tourists We will examine how the various actors of tourism, as well as the places and practices of tourism, appear in works of fiction. Literature, cinema, theater, song, advertising, etc., stage tourist configurations, which are sometimes at the very heart of these fictions.  Fictional tourists include those invent...

Reclaiming the City US academic, Professor Kristin Ross spent periods of travel research in Paris in the 1980s (Ross 1988) to develop a new method of inquiry to link literary text and urban space.  Her findings will be used here to explain some of the key aspects of social space in French cities.  She chooses poetry as her data source quite deliberately, giving a challenging rationale for this decision.  Whilst the study of narrative prose in the nineteenth-century novel is conducted in French Studies departments of British and American universities with an unexplained assumption that these texts are a social production of reality, Ross argues that verse is considered to be 'a desiring production that is mere fantasy or wish fulfilment' (Ross, 1988, 11).  Her study values poetry as a discursive practice that can yield data on the social developments of an era.  Her key argument, or finding, from her textual analyses is that social space was transformed during th...

Architecture and the French Novel Second Empire architecture and the great department stores are a powerful visitor attraction for Paris in the twenty-first century. Many of the buildings of this period are extravagant mixtures of architectural style using references to gothic but with new building technologies, for example the iron girder, which reflect both France's imperial status and its material gains.  The French empire included both Vietnam and Algeria during this period, indeed the 1885 Maupassant novel, Bel Ami begins with its main character, Duroy, returning from military service in Algeria , and later in the story, land speculation in Algeria contributes to his wealth. The novel appears in English as The History of a Scoundrel in 1903 and gives a description of the Folies Bergère , a visitor attraction which had only opened in May 1869.  At the time of writing a further film adaptation of Bel Ami has been released (2012) directed by Declan Donnellan, demonstr...

French Novels in Literary Tourism The classic novels of France have a central theme that repeatedly deals with modern urban culture in a serious way.  This theme is expressed through the development of the French novel in the nineteenth century in a way which is quite different from English literature in the same period.  The realist writer, Balzac (1799-1850), for example presents a series of novels that chart life in Paris after the fall of Napoleon in 1815 which is very different in approach from the writing of Charles Dickens (1812-70).  Ultimately, this does have an effect on literary tourism associated with these writers today.  Even though Dickens is examining London life in the nineteenth century their literary styles are very different; Dickens uses humour and irony whereas Balzac tackles the issues of class in a more direct, unforgiving manner.  Using a non-comedic approach, like Balzac, Zola (1840-1902) embarks on a self-declared, serious scientific...

Patrick Modiano’s novel,  Dora Bruder   Immobilised indoors has given me time to indulge in Literary E-Tourism.  I started reading Patrick Modiano’s novel from April 1997, Dora Bruder this morning and immediately his opening lines provide sufficient detail to see if he is using real facts and places. He opens with a brief newspaper item from 31 st December 1941; it was the period when Marshal Pétain was Chief of State in France. The first literary tourism question then is, can a copy of that evening newspaper, Paris-soir be found? I know that Gallica, which gives on-line access to scanned documents from the French National Library, the {BnF, will probably hold the edition mentioned in the novel. Actually, it was with genuine surprise and something of that same thrill of discovery you feel when you arrive at the exact spot mentioned in a novel that I found this: There is the missing persons message for Dora Bruder on page 3 as Modiano’s novel says!  Take a look at...

English-language readers will be pleased to hear that another of Patrick Modiano’s novels has been translated from French and is available in the UK. If, like me, and my blog followers, you have become addicted to Modiano’s writing then this next one should be a real treat.  The original French version, called L’herbe des nuits has been around in paperback since May 2014, its literal translation would have been, well, Nights’ Grass , Night Grasses , the story itself holds a clue as the narrator searches for the lost words of a manuscript from the 1960s, one is put in mind of the lines from a poem by Mandelstam:   'What pain - hunting for the lost word, lifting these sore eyelids,   And, with lime in your blood, gathering night grasses for alien tribes'                                     ...