Traveling in Place A History of Armchair Travel |
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| Author:
| Stiegler, Bernd |
| Translator:
| Filkins, Peter |
| ISBN: | 978-0-226-77467-1 |
| Publication Date: | Oct 2013 |
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press
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| Book Format: | Hardback |
| List Price: | USD $27.00 |
Book Description:
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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...
More DescriptionBeginning 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 Cortázar. 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.