Paths of the Sublime: Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel

oleh: M.C.C. Mendes

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: Universidade do Algarve 2015-05-01

Deskripsi

Bearing in mind the central place of literary, academic, and religious tourism in Cultural Studies and in Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel (2002), the paper seeks: 1) to identify some remarkable travels of famous writers – the British Wordsworth; the French Karl-Joris Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles Baudelaire; 2) to show that in the analysis of such authors’ itineraries (from Europe to the East), there is a search for cultural roots, a mapping of spaces and people, and a deconstruction of labels often related to the Other; 3) to point out that the tourist is also a storyteller, a protagonist, and a creator of fictional worlds; 4) to bring together literary tourism and artistic tourism, through the identification of allusions to other cultural events (painting, music, and architecture); 5) to characterize tourism as a literary and aesthetic experience of the Sublime.