How to Talk About Places You've Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel - Couverture rigide

Bayard, Pierre

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1620401371 ISBN 13 : 9781620401378

Editeur : Bloomsbury USA, 2016

Synopsis

Written in the irreverent style that made How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read a critical and commercial success, Pierre Bayard takes readers on a trip around the world, giving us essential guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places we've never been. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Places You've Never Been will delight and inform armchair globetrotters and jet-setters, all while never having to leave the comfort of the living room.

Bayard examines the art of the "non-journey," a tradition that a succession of writers and thinkers, unconcerned with moving away from their home turf, have employed in order to encounter the foreign cultures they wish to know and talk about. He describes concrete situations in which the reader might find himself having to speak about places he's never been, and he chronicles some of his own experiences and offers practical advice.

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been is a compelling and delightful book that will expand any travel enthusiast's horizon well beyond the places it's even possible to visit in a single lifetime.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, and many other books.

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

Extensive travel and the experience of foreign cultures seem to be becoming an essential requirement for the modern citizen. However, actually visiting these places may not be the best way to discover them, as literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard reveals. He champions the importance of 'armchair travel', arguing that being able to describe somewhere you have never been may even prove crucial to your survival should you need to lie about where you were. So within these two hundred pages, you will learn more about the world than Phileas Fogg did in eighty days. Bayard's psychoanalysis of travel 'experience' encompasses Marco Polo's medieval China (how far did he actually go?), Kant's Königsberg (what could the famously stay-at-home philosopher who rarely ventured beyond the confines of his city know of the world?) and Chateaubriand's early modern North America (how much was invented to fit the views he already held?), and explores a host of phenomena, from lost islands and stolen marathons, to the invented worlds of cheats, murderers, lovers and adulterers. Travelling around the world, disregarding time, geography and reality and blurring the definitions of a 'true' story, Bayard will provoke you to re-examine how you travel and how you don't, and, most importantly, how to talk about it afterwards.

À propos de la deuxième de couverture

Written in the irreverent style that made How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read a critical and commercial success, Pierre Bayard takes readers on a trip around the world, giving us essential guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places we've never been. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Places You've Never Been will delight and inform armchair globetrotters and jet-setters, all while never having to leave the comfort of the living room.

Bayard examines the art of the "non-journey," a tradition that a succession of writers and thinkers, unconcerned with moving away from their home turf, have employed in order to encounter the foreign cultures they wish to know and talk about. He describes concrete situations in which the reader might find himself having to speak about places he's never been, and he chronicles some of his own experiences and offers practical advice.

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been is a compelling and delightful book that will expand any travel enthusiast's horizon well beyond the places it's even possible to visit in a single lifetime.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury USA
• Date d'édition: 2016
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1620401371
• ISBN 13: 9781620401378
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 208
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible