What You Should Know About Travel Writing

Travel writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the narrators encounters with foreign places serve as the dominant subject. Also called  travel literature. All travel writing—because it is writing—is made in the sense of being constructed, says Peter Hulme, but travel writing cannot be made up without losing its designation (quoted by  Tim Youngs in  The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, 2013). Notable contemporary travel writers in English include  Paul Theroux, Susan Orlean, Bill Bryson,  Pico Iyer,  Rory MacLean,  Mary Morris, Dennison Berwick,  Jan Morris, Tony Horwitz,  Jeffrey Tayler, and Tom Miller, among countless others. Examples of Travel Writing By the Railway Side by Alice MeynellLists and Anaphora in Bill Brysons Neither Here Nor ThereLists in William Least Heat-Moons Place DescriptionLondon From a Distance by Ford Madox FordNiagara Falls by Rupert BrookeNights in London by Thomas BurkeOf Trave, by Francis BaconOf Travel by Owen FellthamRochester by Nathaniel Hawthorne Examples and Observations The best writers in the field [of travel writing] bring to it an indefatigable curiosity, a fierce intelligence that enables them to interpret, and a generous heart that allows them to connect. Without resorting to invention, they make ample use of their imaginations. . . .The travel book itself has a similar grab bag quality. It incorporates the characters and plot line of a novel, the descriptive power of poetry, the substance of a history lesson, the discursiveness of an essay, and the—often inadvertent—self-revelation of a memoir. It revels in the particular while occasionally illuminating the universal. It colors and shapes and fills in gaps. Because it results from displacement, it is frequently funny. It takes readers for a spin (and shows them, usually, how lucky they are). It humanizes the alien. More often than not it celebrates the unsung. It uncovers truths that are stranger than fiction. It gives eyewitness proof of life’s infinite possibilities.(Tho mas Swick, Not a Tourist. The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2010)Narrators and NarrativesThere exists at the center of travel books like [Graham] Greenes Journey Without Maps or [V.S.] Naipauls An Area of Darkness a mediating consciousness that monitors the journey, judges, thinks, confesses, changes, and even grows. This narrator, so central to what we have come to expect in modern travel writing, is a relatively new ingredient in travel literature, but it is one that irrevocably changed the genre. . . .Freed from strictly chronological, fact-driven narratives, nearly all contemporary travel writers include their own dreams and memories of childhood as well as chunks of historical data and synopses of other travel books. Self reflexivity and instability, both as theme and style, offer the writer a way to show the effects of his or her own presence in a foreign country and to expose the arbitrariness of truth and the absence of norms.(Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World . Routledge, 2002)V.S. Naipaul on Making InquiriesMy books have to be called travel writing, but that can be misleading because in the old days travel writing was essentially done by men describing the routes they were taking. . . . What I do is quite different. I travel on a theme. I travel to make an inquiry. I am not a journalist. I am taking with me the gifts of sympathy, observation, and curiosity that I developed as an imaginative writer. The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives.(V.S. Naipaul, interview with Ahmed Rashid, Death of the Novel. The Observer, Feb. 25, 1996)Paul Theroux on the Travelers Mood- Most travel narratives—perhaps all of them, the classics anyway—describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road is the story; the journey, not the arrival, matters, and most of the time the traveler—the traveler’s mood, especially —is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and self-portraiture, travel writing as diffused autobiography; and so have many others in the old, laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing.(Paul Theroux, The Soul of the South. Smithsonian Magazine, July-August 2014)-  Most visitors to coastal Maine know it in the summer. In the nature of visitation, people show up in the season. The snow and ice are a bleak memory now on the long warm days of early summer, but it seems to me that to understand a place best, the visitor needs to see figures in a landscape in all seasons. Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter. You see that the population is actually quite small, the roads are empty, some of the restaurants are closed, the houses of the summer people are dark, their driveways unplowed. But Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals.Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. Boats are repaired, traps fixed, nets mended. â€Å"I need the winter to rest my body,† my friend the lobsterman told me, speaking of how he suspended his lobstering in December and did not resume until April. . . .(Paul Theroux, The Wicked Coast. The Atlantic, June 2011)Susan Orlean on the Journey- To be honest, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience—the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing—the Bible, the Odyssey, Chaucer, Ulysses—that isnt explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I dont actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what Ive seen.(Susan Orlean, Introduction to My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Whos Been Everywhere. Random House, 2004)- When I went to Scotland for a friends wedding last summer, I didnt plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course; but I didnt expect to shoot or get shot at. The wedding was taking place in a medieval castle in a speck of a village called Biggar. There was not a lot to do in Biggar, but the caretaker of the castle had skeet-shooting gear, and the male guests announced that before the rehearsal dinner they were going to give it a go. The women were advised to knit or shop or something. I dont know if any of us women actually wanted to join them, but we didnt want to be left out, so we insisted on coming along. . . .(Susan Orlean, opening paragraph of Shooting Party. The New Yorker, September 29, 1999)Jonathan Raban on the Open House- As a literary form, travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where different genres are likely to end up in the bed. It accommodates the private diary, the essay, the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality. It freely mixes narrative and discursive writing.(Jonathan Raban, For Love Money: Writing - Reading - Travelling 1968-1987. Picador, 1988)- Travel in its purest form requires no certain destination, no fixed itinerary, no advance reservation and no return ticket, for you are trying to launch yourself onto the haphazard drift of things, and put yourself in the way of whatever changes the journey may throw up. Its when you miss the one flight of the week, when the expected friend fails to show, when the pre-booked hotel reveals itself as a collection of steel joists stuck into a ravaged hillside, when a stranger asks you to share the cost of a hired car to a town whose name youve never heard, that you begin to travel in earnest.(Jonathan Raban, Why Travel? Driving Home: An American Journey. Pantheon, 2011)The Joy of Travel WritingSome travel writers can become serious to the point of lapsing into good ol American puritanism. . . . What nonsense! I have traveled much in Concord. Good travel writing can be as much about having a good time as about eating grubs and chasing drug lords. . . . [T]ravel is for learning, for fun, for escape, for personal quests, for challenge, for exploration, for opening the imagination to other lives and languages.(Frances Mayes, Introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2002. Houghton, 2002)

New Political And Military Structures - 1036 Words

Early humans began to form small groups that created a simple culture for survival; however, as human cultures grew, civilizations formed. A civilization is an intricate culture where large numbers of people contribute a variety of traditional components. Historians came up with seven basic characteristics of civilization. The seven are as follows: an urban focus, new political and military structures, a new social structure based on economic power, the development of more complexity in a material sense, a distinct religious structure, the development of writing, and new significant artistic and intellectual activity (Pg.8). Urban focus was when cities became the centers for political, economic, social, cultural, and religious development (Pg.8). The first creators of a Mesopotamian civilization where the Sumerians. By 3000 B.C.E, they had created a large amount of independent cities in southern Mesopotamia. Once the cities began to expand, they began to use political and economic co ntrol over the nearby country sides (pg.10-11). New political and military structures organized government bureaucracy to meet the administrative commands of the rising population. Armies where also being made to gain land and power for defense. In Sumerian society, kings had power. The kinds where the ones to organize the armies workers. The army, government bureaucracy, and the priest and priestesses all aided the kings in their rule (pg.11). Another characteristic of the civilizationShow MoreRelatedEast Asia Essay792 Words   |  4 Pagesto form their own national identity along with their own system of ruling elites. In China there is a definite beginning to the new political elite which stems from the transition from the Tang to Song dynasties culminating in 960. 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I will also write about the technological and strategic advances that the military made during the medieval ages and how those had an impact on the role of the military today. In medieval

My Sociological Imagination Started Influencing Me A Lot

The term â€Å"Sociological Imagination† can be defined in various contexts and in different ways depending on the situation and surroundings. According to most researchers, the definition of the term varies from case to case. Due to different scenarios and observations, most researchers have failed to apply a single definition of the term. However, after studying a number of cases, there is a general definition that we can associate to this term, i.e. the interaction of one’s mind and its experiences. I, being an African-American, got the crucial grievance to be inspired by the relationship of the police and the Ferguson community on the tragedy to highlight the significance of the race. My sociological imagination started influencing me a lot. You are never sure of when and for what people get offended. What is right in my part of living today may be completely unacceptable in some other place. By shifting your social environment you are forced to rethink your path and doubt yourself. You cannot take things for granted. Other than this, systematic racism has been emerging in American society in every field. All the democrats as well as republicans have different views regarding tragic incident, happened on 9th August, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri a native of suburb of St. Louis. The prevailing issues are rich in demonstrating the sociological issues including inequality in terms of wealth and profiling on the basis of race and â€Å"criminalization of Black male youth†.Show MoreRelatedStudy Guide9234 Words   |  37 Pagesfactors that might influence a person’s decision rather than accepting commonsense answers. 2. What is the sociological imagination and how do history and personal biography affect it? If a sociologist studies the challenges experienced by a student earning a college degree, how could the lessons gained be described as â€Å"terrible† as well as â€Å"magnificent†? 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America After World War One Essay Example For Students

America After World War One Essay During the 1920s, tension arose between a new generation, with liberal and progressive ideas, and a more traditional peer group, who favored conventional values and sentimentalism. This social tension was caused by technological advancements, a revolution in society in the period of and directly following World War I, a revolution of morals and rapid urbanization. The new generation expressed themselves through the music of the times, greater sexual promiscuity, use of technology and advertising, whereas the elder generation manifested intolerance and resistance.World War I is known as the first modern war, because a new kind of warfare was utilized, new technologies were operated, planes fought in combat, and women played a key role in manufacturing and other positions formerly held by men. In the shift from wartime to peacetime, many women were reluctant and rebellious to return to their positions of domesticity, and sought other opportunities. With the passing of the nineteenth amendment in 1920, younger women felt even more liberated, and changed their style of dress, hair and life: skirts became shorter, hair was bobbed, and many women began to smoke. Along with this questioning of traditional values, one can see a steady increase in the divorce rate and a sharp drop in the number of marriages. Religion, in a traditional way of life, was also challenged with new theories such as that of evolution and natural selection, literal interpretation of Scripture, and the incorporation of contemporary trends, such as jazz, into ones image of heaven. During this time, American cities grew larger at an alarming rate; the sources of this growing population were immigrants. These newcomers were a significant part of the disharmony that existed between the old and the new in the 1920s, because they presented diversity to a people who were striving become more provincial and who wanted to preserve Americanism. It was these groups that the Ku Klux Klan fought to restore power to the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock. They yearned for a return to the life that once existed, but was drastically changed through industry, manufacturing, and urbanization. In not being able to accept the fact that agrarianism was falling second to industry, groups of the old stock, such as the Ku Klux Klan, in not accepting any new values augmented the tension that existed through their intolerance and persecution of the liberals. The newer generation, on the other hand, manifested their roar of the twenties by a different way of dress, in listening to jazz and creating new manias such as the Charleston. These liberals also accepted the technology of the times by purchasing cars and were affected by sensationalist advertising for toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water-heaters. The older generation viewed them as sexually indiscriminate, and this was true because for the first time premarital sex was advocated, birth control (although illegal) was used with the aid of such people as Sanger, and the rate of marriages dropped. The Roaring Twenties were an era in which tension emanated between a new generation, with a broad-minded and revisionist disposition, and a more traditional group, who favored conformism, nostalgia and customary values. This social tension was caused by changes in social status in the period of World War I, technological progression, a revolution of morals and rapid urbanization. The new generation expressed themselves through the music of the times, greater sexual promiscuity, use of technology such as the automobile, and advertising, whereas the older generation of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants manifested narrow-mindedness and hardness.