Required reading: the role of the literary scholar in mapping difference and prompting interest in distant destinations

ABSTRACT

Taking account of research into the relationship between the reading of narrative fiction and niche tourism, this article speculates on the role of the university lecturer of literature in shaping the touristic desires of students. It is especially interested in the influence of European based lecturers of American fiction as they stimulate the geographic imaginations of their learners. Since cultural capital accrues through the reading of serious works of literature, the influence of lecturers is likely to have some bearing on the eventual travel destinations of university graduates prompted to seek out the material locations that they have read about in books.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary tourism
• university reading lists
• literary scholarship
• literary studies
• fiction
• literary travel

Subject classification codes:

• tourism
• literary tourism
• literary studies
• American literature
• European higher education

Notes

1 The research group’s forthcoming book, Locating Imagination in Popular Culture (Van Es et al., 2020), extends these arguments.

2 For an interesting comparison to a similar phenomenon in Business Entrepreneurship Studies, see Denise Fletcher’s 2007 article in Journal of Business Venturing called ‘‘Toy Story’: The narrative world of entrepreneurship and the creation of interpretive communities,’ in which Fletcher extensively outlines how ‘in terms of entrepreneurship and its representation in research reports, education processes and in the media, narrative is the basic figuration process through which understandings and meanings about entrepreneurial activities are produced, reproduced and disseminated (Steyaert and Bouwen, 1997)’. She further discovers that because ‘newspaper reports, biographies and television documentary programs are well-stocked with narrative accounts, tutors “liven up” their class sessions by incorporating stories about entrepreneurial practices into their curricula” (653) and concludes that those who study entrepreneurship make use of the stories they hear and read to ‘shape further action’ in their working lives (655).