Deep maps: travelling on the spot

Like most non-fiction, travel writing has had comparatively little attention paid to its formal and rhetorical characteristics. Now that the study of travel writing is becoming a more established part of the academic landscape, it is probably time to begin to map some of its strategies from a more global perspective. Formal analysis has its uses and its limitations. However, there has been so little formal analysis of travel writing that some broad brush strokes should be possible. The aspect that interests me here as a starting point has to do with travel writing’s relationship with mobility. Travel writing is hardly possible without the description of movement of some sort, but travel writing almost always wants to say something about the places the travel writer visits. Movement and place are therefore constantly in tension. To stay and to get to know-to travel on the spot-is not to move; to move is to risk that impressions be superficial.