Travellers’ memories: the image of places from literature to blog chatter

Abstract

Starting from the assumption that texts produced in the tourist sector are a form of discourse, the paper focuses on narrative texts and singles out two sub-genres, namely travel literature proper and reports published on tourism websites. The corpus, comprising texts referring to India, is analysed with mainly qualitative methodology. Four aspects are considered in detail: enunciation and the author / reader relationship; the presence of subjective vs objective points of view; the time-space dimension; the exploitation of shared knowledge and stereotypes. The analysis reveals that the two sub-genres share some textual features and, despite their different literary value, both contribute to the construction of an image of the destination which can play a signifi cant role in tourism promotion.

Keywords

• discourse analysis
• the discourse of tourism
• travel literature
• travel reports
• narrative
• enunciation
• stereotypes