A portrait of human folly, bias, humiliation, and desire for connection

November 3, 2024 2:30 AM

This literary subgenre has arguably been around since the dawn of written material but didn’t emerge as a distinct sector of scholarship and pedagogy until roughly the 1980s. Remaining contested as a classifiable writing mode, it straddles the boundaries of personal essay, memoir, journalism, cultural criticism, food writing, nature writing, and more dominant umbrellas like fiction and poetry. All that said and done, it would be remiss to claim that this reading list is comprehensive or authoritative; even for a writing scholar and critic who regularly teaches travel writing at the college level, the subgenre and its accompanying breadth of scholarship eludes definitive contours. Simply put, it has its tendrils in too many places. from All Travelers are Infiltrators: An Introduction to the Study of Travel Writing [Jstor]
posted by chavenet (3 comments total)

Gentrification is a social-political-economic form of ethnic cleansing, less violent certainly than that of wartime but just as effective in terms of demographic change.

That's a pretty heavy sentence. Not sure how I feel about it.
posted by mhoye at 4:56 AM on November 3 [4 favorites]

I'm very fond of the two travel narratives Boswell and Johnson wrote about touring Scotland. Johnson famously hated the place and only went under protest, while it was Boswell's home. Johnson's entries are short, bitter, glum, while Boswell's are rich, detailed, and happy.
posted by doctornemo at 6:09 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]

That's a pretty heavy sentence. Not sure how I feel about it.

Me either. To avoid a derail, just noting that the sentence is not from the articles in this FPP but from a different Jstor article, Global Gentrification
posted by chavenet at 6:27 AM on November 3 [3 favorites]