Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 9/9/2004
EAN 9780521838535, ISBN10: 0521838533
Hardcover, 246 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
Semiologies of Travel is the first book to explore comprehensively the role of semiology and signs in the encounter with foreign cultures as it is expressed in French travel writing. David Scott focuses on major writers of the last two hundred years, including Théophile Gautier, André Gide, Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, to show how ethnology, politics, sociology and semiotics, as well as literature, are deeply bound up in travel experience and the writing that emerges from it. Scott also shows how the concerns of Romantic writers and theorists are still relevant to reflections on travel in today's post-modern world. The book follows an itinerary through jungle, desert and Utopia, as well as through Disneyland and Chinese restaurants, and will be of interest to specialists in French studies and cultural studies as well as to readers of travel writing.
Introduction
1. Reading signs
foregrounding the signifier from Gautier to Baudrillard
2. The other as interpretant
from Segalen and Michaux to the ethno-roman
3. Identity crises
'Je est un autre', Gautier, Gauguin, Nerval, Bouvier
4. Utopias and dystopias
back in the US/USSR, Gide, Baudrillard, Disneyland
5. Signs in the desert
from Chateaubriand to Baudrillard
6. Jungle books
misreading the jungle with Gide, Michaux and Leiris
7. Grammars of gastronomy, the raw and the cooked
Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Boman and Leiris
Conclusion
writing difference, coming home to write.