The Trans-textured Tourist: Literature as Knowledge in the Making of Tourists

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which those in literary societies learn to be tourists through the leisurely practices of ‘reading’ creative writings and fictive texts. This cognitive act is a playful, inventive and an integral part of the normative process of socialization whereby humans are imbued with knowledge of cultural practices and values, together with social norms and expectations. It is argued that from our readings of the many deep and central themes that run through fictional narratives we encounter the meanings of what it is to be a tourist. Through the meeting of imaginations we learn of pervasive and eternal ideas that are woven into our literary culture and that are the essence of tourism: places and peoples that are elsewhere; encounters with various forms of ‘the other’; journeys, quests, pilgrimages and discoveries; notions of paradise; redemption and loss; a sense of belonging; the fleeting and the recollected. In the act of reading we construct imagined frameworks, which will later inform our actions and experiences.

Keywords:

• tourist
• knowledge
• literature
• intertextuality
• fictive texts