Does literary tourism enhance or cheapen the experience of reading?
Arriving in London for the first time many years ago, I hadn't shaken off my jet lag before heading directly to London Bridge, where I walked with the morning crowds ("so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many"), and, fixing my eyes before my feet, "flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine." Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot's dreary commute to his tedious job at Lloyds Bank, a path memorialized in the lines of The Waste Land, I engaged in what has since become a part of all my travels: literary tourism.
That visit felt like Anna Quindlen's account in Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City (National Geographic, 2004), in which she marvels at the city's array of literary sites: "I had been to them all in my imagination before I ever set foot in England. So that by the time I actually visited London ... for the first time, it felt less like an introduction and more like a homecoming."
In The Literary Tourist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Nicola J. Watson, of the Open University, in England, calls the titular activity a secular variant of religious pilgrimage. Harvard's Lawrence Buell, discussing the "Thoreauvian Pilgrimage" to Walden Pond in The Environmental Imagination (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1995), doesn't scruple to label such tourism avowedly sacred: recounting the naturalist John Muir's 1893 visit to Concord, Buell describes the portrayal of Concord as a place of "holy calm," which "conveys a sense of treading in the footsteps of the 'great men.'" Muir "concentrates his attention and reverence on the famous shrines ... and he acquires iconic mementos." Buell compares such hagiographic devotion to the via crucis, the pilgrim's re-enactment of Jesus' procession to Calvary....
Read entire article at Randy Malamud in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
That visit felt like Anna Quindlen's account in Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City (National Geographic, 2004), in which she marvels at the city's array of literary sites: "I had been to them all in my imagination before I ever set foot in England. So that by the time I actually visited London ... for the first time, it felt less like an introduction and more like a homecoming."
In The Literary Tourist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Nicola J. Watson, of the Open University, in England, calls the titular activity a secular variant of religious pilgrimage. Harvard's Lawrence Buell, discussing the "Thoreauvian Pilgrimage" to Walden Pond in The Environmental Imagination (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1995), doesn't scruple to label such tourism avowedly sacred: recounting the naturalist John Muir's 1893 visit to Concord, Buell describes the portrayal of Concord as a place of "holy calm," which "conveys a sense of treading in the footsteps of the 'great men.'" Muir "concentrates his attention and reverence on the famous shrines ... and he acquires iconic mementos." Buell compares such hagiographic devotion to the via crucis, the pilgrim's re-enactment of Jesus' procession to Calvary....