Tourism and invention :
Roland Barthes's Empire of signs /
by Craig Jonathan Saper.
Description
- Language(s)
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English
- Published
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1990.
- Summary
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This dissertation extrapolates a method primarily from Roland Barthes's Empire of Signs. Similar to a travelogue and ethnographer's diary, that text serves as an example of a new genre called invention-tourism. This genre plays through tour guides, travelogues, and the cliches about travelers in order to explore how tourism mediates differences, strangers, newness, etc.. This tourist's discourse suggests a semiotician-on-tour. That on-tour changes the understanding of attractions from objects-to-demythologize to magnets of attention. Attractions of attention change research routes and provoke a lost-sense, a doubt between knowing the way and asking for directions. A sense of loss, and of being lost, sets in motion an inner stenography of textual substitutions, variations, and multivalences. In terms of invention, these variations in expectation indicate emergent ideas. Without deciding on any particular choice, truth, or argument, it creates a setting for an artificial or textual brainstorming. Psychological traits of creativity no longer orient research on invention. A textual theory of invention based on a synthesis of contemporary psychological research and philosophical criticisms of creativity stresses the importance of the organization, accessibility, and provocativeness of knowledge. These textual factors restrict or encourage invention. Invention-tourism, applied to our home language and way of knowing, affects how we package knowledge and how we use our memories. Rhetors have long interpreted memory as a textual practice, an art of memory, rather than a purely cognitive function. By "drawing a blank" in memory or memory theaters, an art of invention emerges. Rather than a theater it functions as an invention multimedia performance. In terms of pedagogical applications, tourism is an oft repeated term for the new attitude required by the electronic classroom. Cultivating access and links among bits of information requires one to move through information as a tourist; informatics and generative assignments supplement memory in invention- tourism.
- Note
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Vita.
Typescript.
- Physical Description
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iv, 299 leaves ;
28 cm.
Viewability