Traveling in Place: A History of Armchair Travel

Traveling in Place: A History of Armchair Travel

Bernd Stiegler

Language: English

Pages: 264

ISBN: 0226774678

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Armchair travel may seem like an oxymoron. Doesn’t travel require us to leave the house? And yet, anyone who has lost herself for hours in the descriptive pages of a novel or the absorbing images of a film knows the very real feeling of having explored and experienced a different place or time without ever leaving her seat. No passport, no currency, no security screening required—the luxury of armchair travel is accessible to us all. In Traveling in Place, Bernd Stiegler celebrates this convenient, magical means of transport in all its many forms.
Organized into twenty-one “legs”—or short chapters—Traveling in Place begins with a consideration of Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 Voyage autour de ma chambre, an account of the forty-two-day “journey around his room” Maistre undertook as a way to entertain himself while under house arrest. Stiegler is fascinated by the notion of exploring the familiar as though it were completely new and strange. He engages writers as diverse as Roussel, Beckett, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, Cortázar, Kierkegaard, and Borges, all of whom show how the everyday can be brilliantly transformed. Like the best guidebooks, Traveling in Place is more interested in the idea of travel as a state of mind than as a physical activity, and Stiegler reflects on the different ways that traveling at home have manifested themselves in the modern era, from literature and film to the virtual possibilities of the Internet, blogs, and contemporary art.
Reminiscent of the pictorial meditations of Sebald, but possessed of the intellectual playfulness of Calvino, Traveling in Place offers an entertaining and creative Baedeker to journeying at home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

not a botanist but rather a physicist. He lost his daughter, whose husband absconded with his granddaughter, and he has traveled about the world in vain while in search of the latter. But at last the family is brought together as a result of the journey through the building, which also holds a place for the narrator as a future son-in-law. Such a narrative integration within the genealogical tree is not found in Alphonse Karr. His Voyage autour de mon jardin (A Tour round My Garden) describes in

It is, according to de Maistre, the sun that does the work—and with amazing precision: “The presentation misses nothing: objects which one can hardly see in the distance with one’s own eyes are reproduced with exceptional exactitude; the picture of a telegraph operator, who in the dark chamber is reduced to a hardly perceptible size can be observed so precisely with a magnifying glass that one can almost see the message being conveyed” (de Maistre 20). The same goes for a shot of Daguerre’s

as for contemporary literature. While, most recently, he turned a reflection about signs into literature in his tetralogy Slow Homecoming, in which natural, cultural, and individual systems of signs are considered transposed on one another in complex ways, and juxtaposed to one another in new ways, we also find in contemporary German literature positions that aim not at a synthesis but rather a destruction of the social and mass media systems of signs that are so prevalent. Without question, one

mountains.” During your visit, you can also send your friends postcards with views of the countryside. The Sacri Monti, which we encountered on the Second Leg, have been transformed into virtual mountains, which are also meant to supersede what was formerly an exhausting journey. 20.1    Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg, Vue des Alpes; in Monica Studer, Christoph van den Berg, and Andreas Baur, eds., Being a Guest (Basel, 2003), 11. 20.2    Vue des Alpes; website screen shot. Also,

this particular transformation of space, the room attains a meaning unavailable to the secular gaze or the heathen: “There where the economist and the native see nothing more than ‘shelter,’ a sanctuary exists. It invites us to observe our room as a place that unites within itself various sacraments” (Gautier 11). And thus it’s hardly any wonder that amid such a journey the room resembles a window of a gothic cathedral (Gautier 19), the body-room-cathedral being a sacred place, a place of

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