Archive for October 2018

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[ecrea] New Book Publication: Mediating Travel Writing, Mediated China

Mon Oct 29 14:33:47 GMT 2018



New book publication in the field of travel writing, digital ethnography and West-China intercultural relations
by Commong Ground Publishing (Champaign, US)

The book is titled "Mediating Travel Writing, Mediated China: The Middle Kingdom in Travel Books and Blogs" (2018) and is authored by Dr Stefano Calzati, currently Teaching Fellow in the courses of "Sociology of Media" and "Anthropology of Communication" at Politecnico University of Milan (together with prof. Matteo Ciastellardi and Prof. Derrick De Kerckhove) and previously Postdoc Fellow at the City University of Hong Kong.

Excerpt and recommendations from the back cover:

"What is the cultural value of travel writing today? How is the genre affected by instant communication and digital technology? To these questions, Calzati’s book seeks and offers an answer. In 'Mediating Travel Writing, Mediated China', Calzati adopts a transmedial and materialist perspective to explore how different medial choices impact on the practices of travelling and writing. The work draws upon texts in different languages – English, French, Italian and Chinese – which eventually question any neat definition of “West” and “China” as geopolitical concepts. By considering travel writing, at once, as an object of study and a conceptual frame, Calzati’s book provides a richly researched and theoretically sound study on contemporary mobility and new forms of textualization."

"'Mediating Travel Writing, Mediated China' is an important study in many ways: introducing dozens of contemporary travel blogs about China (in English, French and Italian), Stefano Calzati not only expands the corpus of western travel writing about China but, perhaps more importantly, also dismantles the binaries of the printed and the digital text, travel writers and travel bloggers, ‘classical’ and ‘contemporary’ travelogues, and verbal and visual modes of communication. Any reader who wonders whether, or how, travel writing is evolving in the age of the internet, and the way in which contemporary travel writers think about their project in the global twenty-first century, will find answers in in this richly researched and elegantly written study." /Julia Kuehn, Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and in Travel Writing at the University of Hong Kong/


"Aside from the usual contention that travel writing is a politicized genre, Stefano Calzati investigates the materiality of the genre by comparing how different media (travel books and travel blogs) are used in different cultures (European, American,Chinese) for shaping the travelling and writing experiences and their presentation. Herein lies the additional gain, beyond travel writing studies, of this knowledgeable and inspiring book: travel writing becomes a symbol for a more profound reflection about the change in contemporary strategies for making sense of the world, the other, and the self."/Roberto Simanowski, acknowledged expert in Media Studies and Digital Cultures./



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