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Traveling in place : a history of armchair travel

Stiegler, Bernd2013
Book
Beginning with a consideration of Xavier de Maistre's 1794 Voyage de autour de ma chamber, an account of Maistre's forty-two day "journey around his room" while enduring house arrest, Stiegler reflects on the many different ways that the idea of traveling while at home--armchair travel--have manifested in the modern era. Through twenty-one "legs,"--or short chapters--it moves quickly from the eighteenth century to consider a wide variety of episodes all the way up to the present day. Along the way, we encounter writers as diverse as Maistre, Goncourt, Roussel, Beckett, Calvino, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, and Cortazar. Stiegler is interested in the idea of travel more as a state of mind than as a physical activity, and the book takes on the quality of a meditation here and there. It will find an eclectic audience curious to learn about a subject they may never have thought about before, but which they will immediately recognize as pertinent to how we are all travelers in one way or another in the modern world.
Main title:
Traveling in place : a history of armchair travel / Bernd Stiegler ; translated from the German by Peter Filkins.
Imprint:
Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Collation:
253 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents:
Brief travel guide -- The journey around the room -- Pilgrimages -- The "Frauenzimmer" -- Expeditions in the near-at-hand -- Framed views -- The life of plants -- The life of objects -- The journey through a sea of images -- Dark chambers -- Interiors -- The flâneur -- Excursion and stopover: around the world in eighty days -- Peregrinations -- Travels with a room -- A cinematic baedeker -- The journey to la défense -- Journeys into the world as text -- The journey into oneself -- Crossing-crisscrossing -- Cinematic explorations -- Near distance -- The final journey.
ISBN:
9780226774671 (hardcover alkaline paper)
Dewey class:
809.9332
LC class:
PN56.T7
Language:
EnglishGerman
BRN:
64032
LocationCollectionCall numberStatus/Desc
Library at the Dock-LiteratureLITER 809.9332 STIEAvailable
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