The Permanent Tourist: Guidebooks in Travel and Education

About a year ago I heard a paper presented by Gary Day at the University of York on the fate of theory in higher education. He looked at the ways in which university departments had been brought within the auspices of a culture of inspection. In a world where higher education commands a fee and is thus becoming more and more commodified, there must be some means of assuring the quality of the product on offer, as there are for other kinds of product on the market ranging from telecommunications to food safety. In particular, he references Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice (1980) and Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory (1995) as landmark moments in a drive to render the skills gleaned from English courses more quantifiable. If a Higher Education course is a commodity in which students are investing time and money, they need to feel certain that by the end of the course they will have received the skills in which they have invested, otherwise they will select another course from the market. These guidebooks to literary and cultural theory are thus an important means of providing the students with the skills they require. They minimize the students’ personal response to texts, providing instead a checklist of what various authors and critics ‘do.’ It is a scenario in which the reader is rendered entirely passive, as if he or she simply absorbs from the manual a basic sense of how they should approach a text if they want to give it a post-colonial, gay, or Marxist reading. To do this is to measure English and the human sciences against the material progress of science and technology – criteria by which they will always be judged wanting since the study of English per se does not achieve material results. Instead, the trend is to generate a set of students who will at least read and think in certain routine ways, which in this case means not thinking for themselves at all, merely consuming and absorbing passively the skills which their theoretical manuals provide. The use of guidebooks in higher education in many ways thus forestalls the possibility for really creative individual work and expression, generating instead a gradually homogenised discipline, English Literature. The production of a passive reader and routine patterns of response informs my idea of guidebooks more generally. It is in the nature of guidebooks to present stable meanings and self-contained units of information. At the same time, the construction of a guidebook means that it is not amenable to interrogation. To depend on a guidebook is not to know what questions we would need to ask in order to disavow the contents of that book. The user of the guide – whether reader or traveller – is thus in many ways a passive figure. In this paper I look both at travel guides and fictional representations of the Guide and suggest that the line dividing them might not be as clear as it seems

Place representation in tourist guidebooks - an example from Singapore

Tourist guidebooks provide an important source of information on places. Different guidebooks are written for different types of visitors to better meet their individual travel needs. This is demonstrated through a content analysis of four guidebooks written for Singapore in the early 1980s. Two of the guidebooks represent variations on mainstream, mass travel interests. The third source presents the long-term expatriates perception, while the fourth source presents the alternative or youth tourist view of Singapore. Urban tourism is shown to be multifaceted, allowing for a diversity of travel motivations, experiences, and behavior

The politics of Istanbul's Ottoman heritage in the era of globalism

History is not merely about events which remind of the past, it is also about political struggles in the present. This is particularly so in contemporary cultural markets where 'history' is increasingly produced and disseminated in a host of commercialized forms. This paper focuses on competing 'historical' narratives which circulate across Istanbul's cultural markets, as they mediate between between the past and the ethnographic present of the city. These are 'political' narratives in the sense that they mobilize alternative versions of Istanbul's Ottoman past, from different class locations and address different constituencies

Deconstructing and Reconstructing Guidebook Ideologies: The Influence of Travel Guidebooks and the Media on Nature Tourism Projects in Costa Rica and Tanzania

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College

Geographies of landscape aesthetics : mapping landscape terminology in digitised historical travel accounts of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs

Acknowledgements Ogg.: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal Analysis, Investigation, Visualisation, Writing –Original Draft Preparation. Wartmann.: Conceptualisation, Supervision, Writing – Review & Editing.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A “Devolved Minority”: Contemporary German and French Guidebook Perspectives of Wales

Guidebooks play an important role in increasing the visibility of a nation, as they introduce the country to potential visitors and create images prior to travelling. However, they also tend to reinforce stereotypes and create “romantic fictions” (Mahn 2008). This article examines the representation of Wales in French and German guidebooks and consequently elucidates the cultural and political recognition of Wales in these continental texts. The depiction of Wales as a distinct entity on an administrative, or rather on a cultural and linguistic level will be discussed, as well as the commonalities and differences between French and German views

Best Practice for Forensic Fishing : Combining Text Processing with an Environmental History View of Historic Travel Writing in Loch Lomond, Scotland

Publisher PD

Change, Choice, and Commercialization: Backpacker Routes in Southeast Asia

South-East Asia has the oldest and largest backpacker trails. This paper examines the geographies of such flows, drawing upon the largest survey to date of backpackers in Asia using qualitative research to survey the key changes from the 1970s to the 2000s. Backpacker trails have changed significantly and new routes have emerged including the ‘northern trail’ (Bangkok - Cambodia - Vietnam - Laos). It is to be expected that routes change as backpackers constantly seek new places, pioneering for later mass tourism. However, this paper suggests that using institutionalization as a framework, these changing trails and backpacker ‘choices’ can be seen as driven by growing commercialization and institutionalization. This then operates in combination with external variables (travel innovations - low cost airlines, and new transport networks); exogenous shock (political instability, terrorism); and growing regional competition from emerging destinations such as Vietnam and Cambodia