Semiologies of Travel
From Gautier to Baudrillard

Focusing on major French writers of the last 200 years, Scott examines semiological aspects of travel writing.

David Scott (Author)

9780521838535, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 September 2004

246 pages, 14 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16.2 x 2 cm, 0.463 kg

'David Scott's innovative study of the semiologies of travel is a welcome addition to the growing field of works analysing francophone representations of travel. … As the first full-length study to analyse the relationship between travel and semiotics, this important new work paves the way for new modes of investigating travel in the twenty-first century.' French Studies

Semiologies of Travel is the first book to explore comprehensively the role of semiology and signs in the encounter with foreign cultures as it is expressed in French travel writing. David Scott focuses on major writers of the last two hundred years, including Théophile Gautier, André Gide, Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, to show how ethnology, politics, sociology and semiotics, as well as literature, are deeply bound up in travel experience and the writing that emerges from it. Scott also shows how the concerns of Romantic writers and theorists are still relevant to reflections on travel in today's post-modern world. The book follows an itinerary through jungle, desert and Utopia, as well as through Disneyland and Chinese restaurants, and will be of interest to specialists in French studies and cultural studies as well as to readers of travel writing.

Introduction
1. Reading signs: foregrounding the signifier from Gautier to Baudrillard
2. The other as interpretant: from Segalen and Michaux to the ethno-roman
3. Identity crises: 'Je est un autre', Gautier, Gauguin, Nerval, Bouvier
4. Utopias and dystopias: back in the US/USSR, Gide, Baudrillard, Disneyland
5. Signs in the desert: from Chateaubriand to Baudrillard
6. Jungle books: misreading the jungle with Gide, Michaux and Leiris
7. Grammars of gastronomy, the raw and the cooked: Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Boman and Leiris
Conclusion: writing difference, coming home to write.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]