A01=Bernd Stiegler
academic
Author_Bernd Stiegler
authors
beckett
borges
Category=DSB
Category=JBCC9
Category=WTL
cortazar
english
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
eq_travel
guidebook
historical
history
home
homebody
house
imaginary
imagination
journey
kierkegaard
legs
literary
literature
perec
philosophical
philosophy
research
robbe grillet
roussel
scholarly
soothing
transport
transportation
traveler
traveling
vacation
wanderlust
writing
written
Product details
- ISBN 9780226774671
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 15 x 22mm
- Publication Date: 28 Oct 2013
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 standing up from the couch. 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, Cortazar, 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.
Bernd Stiegler is professor of twentieth-century German literature and of literature and media at the University of Konstanz. Peter Filkins is a poet and teaches literature at Bard College.
