Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze - Softcover

Strain, Ellen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081353187X ISBN 13: 9780813531878

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2003

Synopsis

In this globally interconnected planet, we are increasingly able to access exotic locales without ever actually seeing these places firsthand. Instead, what we perceive to be fresh cultural experiences are actually second-hand moments, filtered through mediums such as television, film, the internet, CD-Roms, and various other media.

Ellen Strain posits that the images in film and popular culture not only fill in the gaps of a person’s first-hand—or rather, lack of first-hand—experience with other cultural situations, but also predisposes the “tourist gaze” to view particular locales in a predetermined way. She theorizes the idea of a touristic way of understanding the world in general. How, she asks, are our cross-cultural perceptions of places and peoples created in the first place? Can a set of images—such as postcards—mediate our vision of distant geographies? Are there culturally constructed strategies set up to mediate our cross-cultural perceptions of the exotic? Strain includes the works of Jules Verne, E. M. Forster, and Michael Crichton, as well as film, CD-Rom travel games and virtual reality in her own authorial gaze.   

Public Places, Private Journeys is a unique postmodern exploration of how individuals see across cultural differences in an era of increasingly commercialized and globalized culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Ellen Strain is an assistant professor of film and multimedia in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 081353187X
• ISBN 13: 9780813531878
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328