- Email: [email protected]
Literature and Tourism: Reading and Writing Tourism Texts
PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW
729
sity College, Kent, England, and embraced one or two of the notions of anti antimass tourism. To whom should one recommend this slim and well-documented book? One hesitates to recommend it to mature tourism scholars for reading at airports or during their flights. It might cause some intellectual discomfort, depending on the mission and destination (but they should still peruse it in more tranquil settings). It certainly merits the attention of students of tourism, if not at the beginning undergraduate level, then certainly at the more senior levels, where there is an appetite for, and there are opportunities for, informed serious debate. A
_
Bruce Young: Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5, Canada. Email
Assigned 12 November 2003, Submitted 28 November 2003, Accepted 2 December 2003 doi:10.1016/j.annals.2003.12.016
Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 729–731, 2004 Printed in Great Britain 0160-7383/$30.00
Literature and Tourism: Reading and Writing Tourism Texts Edited by Mike Robinson and Hans Christian Anderson. Continuum 2002, xix + 300 pp, £85 Hbk. ISBN 082645920X
Stanley Howard Fogel University of Waterloo, Canada
The colonization and regulation of literature have remained a constant even in this postcolonial era. Expansionist, one could say, has been the appetite of literature professors who have consolidated a hold on their domain by embracing wholeheartedly the cultural studies enterprise. That critical approach is employed by those who situate and study the social context from which a text emerges rather than seeing that work as springing, virgin-birth like, from the brain and imagination of its creator. Thus, it is a surprise to see a book such as Literature and Tourism: Reading and Writing Tourism Texts, edited by two professors (even if one, Hans Christian Anderson, is the linguistic reincarnation of the 19th century Danish writer) from the relatively unpopulated academic discipline of tourism, seeking to follow literature’s peregrinations from the printed page onto readers’ shelves then into those readers’ travel plans. Theirs is an attempt to frame and map a subgenre of academic terrain they call ‘‘literary tourism’’ (p. xiv). Call it ‘‘revenge of the social
730
PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW
scientist.’’ Their product, though, a hybrid which yokes literary criticism to the analysis of tourism, is an ungainly entity. The premise, how beloved books and authors influence people’s choice of destinations and how they are commodified to receive them, is an interesting one; however, in Literature and Tourism distinctive humanities and social sciences discourses mesh awkwardly. To literary critics such generalizations as the following one found in the ‘‘Introduction’’ by Robinson and Anderson read in too simplistic a way: ‘‘But only with literature are we able to say that the art work itself can lead us on actual journeys to real places, as we engage in aesthetic cultural tourism based on the wonderful, hazy, imprecise world of fact and fiction we inhabit’’ (p. xiv). Not only the implications, but also the grammatical elements of this maxim are shaky. Nor is this an isolated occurrence. One page later, another nostrum about literature reproduces a doubled sense of disquiet: ‘‘Literature can accumulate a lasting image of a country as a tourist destination’’ (p. xvi). The awkwardness of the prose here, incidently, mirrors the editorial carelessness that has Hans Christian Anderson’s name hyphenated on the book’s cover—and only there. Further, the cover reverses the editors’ names as listed on the title page and elsewhere in Literature and Tourism. Although the book’s overarching purpose—to initiate and define an academic subject—does not succeed, the quixotic mixture of essays examining the commodification of writers and their world, real and imagined, does have its redeeming moments. It introduces the reader, for instance, to a quirky subgenre of its own as represented by A Readers’ Guide to A Writer’s Britain: An Enchanting Tour of Literary Landscapes and Shrines. This book, according to Robinson and Anderson, was endorsed by the Tourist Board of England, Scotland, and Wales, and the concretizing of authorial spaces lived in and/or created reveals the touristic residue left in literature’s wake. As unsightly as the detritus of McDonald’s styrofoam containers are the Lilliput ices and Lilliput burgers served at the Lilliput Lunch box; this overflow in the realm of the signifier, it is hoped, is not all that is left of Gulliver’s Travels in the public’s imagination. Although neither Robinson and Anderson, nor their group of contributors, have left essayistic traces of a dadaist nature, such appropriation and commercialization as they describe can perhaps only be blunted by non-mainstream tour packagers. These might advertise, for example, a Sadeian bondage/domination dungeon in the Provenc¸ al town that is the site of one of de Sade’s ruined castles or a nightmarish urban foray drawing on LouisFerdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night for its hallucinogenic experiences. Literature and Tourism, to tout one of its strengths, is probably the only book that juxtaposes analyses of UK theme parks based on Gulliver’s Travels with a close, that is to say ‘‘litcrit’’, reading of Robert Graves’s essay, ‘‘Why I live in Majorca’’: ‘‘The open vowels, repeated l sounds, the specificity of the diction describing both the landscape and the flora of northern Mallorca complement the purposeful syntax’’(p. 111). John Presley, the author of that quotation, is one of the few English professors recruited to the Literature and Tourism volume. One unintended but salutary consequence of the pairing of material from disparate disciplines—social sciences vs. humanities—is to elicit a comparison of discourses that in the postmodern era deploy common sources (Roland Barthes is cited by a couple of the collection’s writers), but distinctive tones.
PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW
731
In addition, some fine aperc¸ us can be found in Literature and Tourism. Presley’s article records the amusing saga of Graves’ fight with developers and con men to preserve the rights to his island property. Far from being mere gossip, the telling of this tale reveals that Graves wrote I Claudius, his most titillating work, to stave off the bankruptcy looming as a result of Mallorca’s residency laws. Another essay, also at the literary end of the book’s literature-tourism spectrum, is David Weir’s ‘‘Nevil Shute and the Landscape of England’’. The author, perplexingly and quirkily, seeks to reconcile the literature-tourism theoretical divide at the conclusion of an article devoted to a heretofore rational engagement with Shute and his oeuvre. It would certainly have intrigued Nevil Shute to think of his works as the stimulus for a new non-locationally specific approach to tourism. In the age of the internet, of emails, and data-bases, the postmodernist researcher will have to roll his or her own (pp. 140–141). Less obfuscating but a little slanted nonetheless is the selection process of the editors. They admit to an anglophilial streak; still, two of thirteen essays focus on Haworth, England, and the Brontes, giving the book too-British a tilt. But other choices do provide some range. There are, among others, essays devoted to Spain’s literary legacy as manifested in its locales; L.M. Montgomery’s Prince Edward Island and the resistance and acquiescence to the mass marketing of her island heritage; Venice’s hold on the literary imagination. All of the essays speak to the commercialization of place that is the consequence of tourism, literary or otherwise. A
_
Stanley Fogel: Department of English, St. Jerome’s University, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G3, Canada. Email
Assigned 18 September 2003. Submitted 28 November 2003. Accepted 2 December 2003 doi:10.1016/j.annals.2003.12.015
Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 731–733, 2004 Printed in Great Britain 0160-7383/$30.00
Tourism and Gastronomy Edited by Anne-Mette Hjalager and Greg Richards. Routledge 2002 xiii + 238 pp (references, index, illustrations) 2002 $90 Hbk. ISBN 0-415-27381-1
Erik Cohen The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel This collection is a landmark volume, establishing academically the study of the interface of tourism and gastronomy. There is a parallel between this book and
729
sity College, Kent, England, and embraced one or two of the notions of anti antimass tourism. To whom should one recommend this slim and well-documented book? One hesitates to recommend it to mature tourism scholars for reading at airports or during their flights. It might cause some intellectual discomfort, depending on the mission and destination (but they should still peruse it in more tranquil settings). It certainly merits the attention of students of tourism, if not at the beginning undergraduate level, then certainly at the more senior levels, where there is an appetite for, and there are opportunities for, informed serious debate. A
_
Bruce Young: Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5, Canada. Email
Assigned 12 November 2003, Submitted 28 November 2003, Accepted 2 December 2003 doi:10.1016/j.annals.2003.12.016
Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 729–731, 2004 Printed in Great Britain 0160-7383/$30.00
Literature and Tourism: Reading and Writing Tourism Texts Edited by Mike Robinson and Hans Christian Anderson. Continuum
Stanley Howard Fogel University of Waterloo, Canada
The colonization and regulation of literature have remained a constant even in this postcolonial era. Expansionist, one could say, has been the appetite of literature professors who have consolidated a hold on their domain by embracing wholeheartedly the cultural studies enterprise. That critical approach is employed by those who situate and study the social context from which a text emerges rather than seeing that work as springing, virgin-birth like, from the brain and imagination of its creator. Thus, it is a surprise to see a book such as Literature and Tourism: Reading and Writing Tourism Texts, edited by two professors (even if one, Hans Christian Anderson, is the linguistic reincarnation of the 19th century Danish writer) from the relatively unpopulated academic discipline of tourism, seeking to follow literature’s peregrinations from the printed page onto readers’ shelves then into those readers’ travel plans. Theirs is an attempt to frame and map a subgenre of academic terrain they call ‘‘literary tourism’’ (p. xiv). Call it ‘‘revenge of the social
730
PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW
scientist.’’ Their product, though, a hybrid which yokes literary criticism to the analysis of tourism, is an ungainly entity. The premise, how beloved books and authors influence people’s choice of destinations and how they are commodified to receive them, is an interesting one; however, in Literature and Tourism distinctive humanities and social sciences discourses mesh awkwardly. To literary critics such generalizations as the following one found in the ‘‘Introduction’’ by Robinson and Anderson read in too simplistic a way: ‘‘But only with literature are we able to say that the art work itself can lead us on actual journeys to real places, as we engage in aesthetic cultural tourism based on the wonderful, hazy, imprecise world of fact and fiction we inhabit’’ (p. xiv). Not only the implications, but also the grammatical elements of this maxim are shaky. Nor is this an isolated occurrence. One page later, another nostrum about literature reproduces a doubled sense of disquiet: ‘‘Literature can accumulate a lasting image of a country as a tourist destination’’ (p. xvi). The awkwardness of the prose here, incidently, mirrors the editorial carelessness that has Hans Christian Anderson’s name hyphenated on the book’s cover—and only there. Further, the cover reverses the editors’ names as listed on the title page and elsewhere in Literature and Tourism. Although the book’s overarching purpose—to initiate and define an academic subject—does not succeed, the quixotic mixture of essays examining the commodification of writers and their world, real and imagined, does have its redeeming moments. It introduces the reader, for instance, to a quirky subgenre of its own as represented by A Readers’ Guide to A Writer’s Britain: An Enchanting Tour of Literary Landscapes and Shrines. This book, according to Robinson and Anderson, was endorsed by the Tourist Board of England, Scotland, and Wales, and the concretizing of authorial spaces lived in and/or created reveals the touristic residue left in literature’s wake. As unsightly as the detritus of McDonald’s styrofoam containers are the Lilliput ices and Lilliput burgers served at the Lilliput Lunch box; this overflow in the realm of the signifier, it is hoped, is not all that is left of Gulliver’s Travels in the public’s imagination. Although neither Robinson and Anderson, nor their group of contributors, have left essayistic traces of a dadaist nature, such appropriation and commercialization as they describe can perhaps only be blunted by non-mainstream tour packagers. These might advertise, for example, a Sadeian bondage/domination dungeon in the Provenc¸ al town that is the site of one of de Sade’s ruined castles or a nightmarish urban foray drawing on LouisFerdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night for its hallucinogenic experiences. Literature and Tourism, to tout one of its strengths, is probably the only book that juxtaposes analyses of UK theme parks based on Gulliver’s Travels with a close, that is to say ‘‘litcrit’’, reading of Robert Graves’s essay, ‘‘Why I live in Majorca’’: ‘‘The open vowels, repeated l sounds, the specificity of the diction describing both the landscape and the flora of northern Mallorca complement the purposeful syntax’’(p. 111). John Presley, the author of that quotation, is one of the few English professors recruited to the Literature and Tourism volume. One unintended but salutary consequence of the pairing of material from disparate disciplines—social sciences vs. humanities—is to elicit a comparison of discourses that in the postmodern era deploy common sources (Roland Barthes is cited by a couple of the collection’s writers), but distinctive tones.
PUBLICATIONS IN REVIEW
731
In addition, some fine aperc¸ us can be found in Literature and Tourism. Presley’s article records the amusing saga of Graves’ fight with developers and con men to preserve the rights to his island property. Far from being mere gossip, the telling of this tale reveals that Graves wrote I Claudius, his most titillating work, to stave off the bankruptcy looming as a result of Mallorca’s residency laws. Another essay, also at the literary end of the book’s literature-tourism spectrum, is David Weir’s ‘‘Nevil Shute and the Landscape of England’’. The author, perplexingly and quirkily, seeks to reconcile the literature-tourism theoretical divide at the conclusion of an article devoted to a heretofore rational engagement with Shute and his oeuvre. It would certainly have intrigued Nevil Shute to think of his works as the stimulus for a new non-locationally specific approach to tourism. In the age of the internet, of emails, and data-bases, the postmodernist researcher will have to roll his or her own (pp. 140–141). Less obfuscating but a little slanted nonetheless is the selection process of the editors. They admit to an anglophilial streak; still, two of thirteen essays focus on Haworth, England, and the Brontes, giving the book too-British a tilt. But other choices do provide some range. There are, among others, essays devoted to Spain’s literary legacy as manifested in its locales; L.M. Montgomery’s Prince Edward Island and the resistance and acquiescence to the mass marketing of her island heritage; Venice’s hold on the literary imagination. All of the essays speak to the commercialization of place that is the consequence of tourism, literary or otherwise. A
_
Stanley Fogel: Department of English, St. Jerome’s University, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G3, Canada. Email
Assigned 18 September 2003. Submitted 28 November 2003. Accepted 2 December 2003 doi:10.1016/j.annals.2003.12.015
Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 731–733, 2004 Printed in Great Britain 0160-7383/$30.00
Tourism and Gastronomy Edited by Anne-Mette Hjalager and Greg Richards. Routledge
Erik Cohen The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel This collection is a landmark volume, establishing academically the study of the interface of tourism and gastronomy. There is a parallel between this book and