Semiologies of Travel from Gautier to Baudrillard

Travel Writing in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century France

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by David Scott

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published July 2004, 256 pages, cloth

ISBN 0521838533

Semiologies of Travel is the first book to explore comprehensively the role of semiology and signs in the encounter with foreign cultures as it is expressed in French travel writing. David Scott focuses on major writers of the last two hundred years, including Théophile Gautier, André Gide, Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, to show how ethnology, politics, sociology and semiotics, as well as literature, are deeply bound up in travel experience and the writing that emerges from it. Scott also shows how the concerns of Romantic writers and theorists are still relevant to reflections on travel in today's post-modern world. The book follows an itinerary through jungle, desert and Utopia, as well as through Disneyland and Chinese restaurants. 14 half-tones

 Contents

Introduction
1. Reading signs: foregrounding the signifier from Gautier to Baudrillard
2. The other as interpretant: from Segalen and Michaux to the ethno-roman
3. Identity crises: 'Je est un autre', Gautier, Gauguin, Nerval, Bouvier
4. Utopias and dystopias: back in the US/USSR, Gide, Baudrillard, Disneyland
5. Signs in the desert: from Chateaubriand to Baudrillard
6. Jungle books: misreading the jungle with Gide, Michaux and Leiris
7. Grammars of gastronomy, the raw and the cooked: Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Boman and Leiris
Conclusion: writing difference, coming home to write.