出版与作家生涯2017granta.com
旅行文学已经死了吗？
Is Travel Writing Dead?
导读
这篇讨论旅行写作是否已死：评论从经济回报、内容饱和、全球化与读者心态解释传统旅行写作的困境，也指出视频博客、旧指南重游等新形式仍在讲故事。对写作者而言，值得思考的是：当异域感被互联网消解，旅行写作还能靠什么提供不可替代的观察与叙事。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
别只靠“目的地很陌生”制造趣味；读者随时能上网看世界，写作要靠具体人物、冲突和第一手细节。
- 02
可以尝试“旧文本/旧路线重走”的结构，让过去与现在对照，把价格、观念和旅行方式的变化写成故事。
- 03
承认媒介在变：视频博主正在分流旅行叙事，文字写作者要提供视频难以替代的深度、反思和语境。
- 04
旧套路如猎奇、震惊读者、炫耀异域已经失效，应寻找当代旅行中的真实矛盾，比如消费化、社交信号和全球化同质化。
HN 评论精选
经济压力、内容饱和与全球化/排外情绪共同挤压传统旅行写作。
三个问题：1）如今作家几乎赚不到钱，除非极其成功；2）旅行写作的黄金时代是世界还很异域、难以前往的时候，但现在旅行电视、廉价航班、博客尤其是 Instagram 帖子已经饱和，想知道某地什么样，上网就能有不错的了解，VR 旅游若成真只会更糟；3）全球化磨平了地方的异域感，到处都有麦当劳，而且舆论钟摆正转向反对外来事物，你怎么把旅行写作卖给脱欧后的市场？
pjc50查看英文原文
Three problems: 1) There's very little money for writers anymore, except the extremely successful 2) Travel writing golden age was when the world was exotic and hard to visit - but now we're saturated in travel TV, cheap flights, blogging and especially Instagram posts. If you want to see what the world looks like somewhere, you can get a pretty good idea from the internet. VR tourism if it happens will only make this worse. 3) Finally, globalisation has worn down the exoticness of places. Everywhere has a McDonald's. And we're heading into a time when the pendulum of public opinion has swung against the foreign. How can you sell travel writing to a Brexit market? (The author has reminded me of Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose Words of Mercury I need to finish.)
旧指南重游可以把时代变迁写成真正有深度的旅行叙事。
我理解这种抱怨，但有些“追随某某足迹”的陈词滥调作品其实相当不错。我最近读了 Douglas Mack 的《Europe on Five Wrong Turns A Day》，作者用 1963 年版 Arthur Frommer 的经典《Europe on Five Dollars a Day》尝试在现代游欧洲。书不只讲“现在更贵了”这种显而易见的事，而是讲整个旅行观念与 1960 年代多么不同。
jhbadger查看英文原文
I get the complaint, but some of those cliched "In the footsteps of..." books are actually pretty good. I recently read Douglas Mack's "Europe on Five Wrong Turns A Day", in which the author tries to visit Europe in the modern day using a 1963 copy of Arthur Frommer's classic "Europe on Five Dollars a Day". It wasn't just the obvious "things are more expensive now", but really about how the whole idea of travel is so different from in the 1960s.
旅行叙事没有死，只是从文字书迁移到了视频社交平台。
我觉得视频博客就是新的旅行写作。YouTube 上有很多人用 GoPro 环游世界、讲故事。他们只是把书本上的文字和照片换成社交平台上的视频，媒介变了，为了更快消费、更多与观众互动。
laurentdc查看英文原文
Meh, it seems to me that vlogging is the new travel writing. YouTube has plenty of channels of people travelling the world and telling stories with their GoPro. They're using videos on a social platform instead of text and photographs on a book. It's just a medium change, to allow for quicker consumption and to engage more with the viewers I guess.
旧式旅行写作的猎奇与开放心态叙事失效，现代旅行写作需处理消费化与社交信号。
互联网之前，旅行写作常把“旅行”当作对异文化保持开放的同义词，常用套路是在当时可接受的限度内让读者震惊；这套今天已过时。全球化让文化互相替换，开放心态反被一些人视为错误，非主流文化体验转而发生在网络角落。2017 年仍在发生的旅行多围绕西方式享乐或社交信号，而且高度组织化、产品化：享乐有度假村评论、全包酒水和夜店索引；社交信号有从报名到结束都被安排好的非洲志愿旅游。谁还想读一个用户刷 Yelp 或 Airbnb 的奇遇？旧式旅行写作的死亡……
VLM查看英文原文
In the pre-internet era travel was a code word for open mindedness toward other cultures. A fairly standard trope in travel writing was freaking out the reader to a perfectly acceptable level at the time of writing. This is obsolete today. Due to globalism we're moving our culture over there to replace theirs and moving their people over here to replace ours. Open mindedness is seen as wrong, "no platforming", utter intolerance toward anything non-progressive and if they're equally progressive over there, there's nothing new to experience there. People who would have found travel interesting in 1970 when I was young now experience unusual non mainstream cultures by visiting various 4chan boards and looking for people who still use the N-word in 2017, or who go camping, or are NEETs. What travel as a verb still happens in 2017 is now about western style decadence or social signalling and both are heavily organized. If you want decadence you read the resort reviews about how good the all inclusive drinks are and proximity to nude beaches and dance clubs and such, its all heavily organized and indexed and sorted and CRUD-app-ified. Who wants to read a book about a quirky end user scrolling thru yelp or airbnb? If you want social signalling, perhaps you need that trip to Africa for volun-tour-ism for that ivy league application, you contact people who organize that from top to bottom, social signalling has been pretty well product-ized. Some of the death of old style travel writing is the death of optimism. Sure my grandpa was one of the few who could go to Scotland for a month with my grandma, it was semi-realistic to afford for joe 6 pack. The days of the middle class ever being able to afford that are long gone along with the optimism; retirement means if you economically and physically survive the medical industrial complex, you get cat food and ramen at best, not a semi-realistic a trip to Scotland. When people are banned from an activity its human nature to claim to stop desiring it until it becomes real; millennials are too poor live in the burbs, they've been totally screwed over; response, we never wanted to live there anyway nah na nah na na. Plus or minus some gaslighting by people with a bridge to sell to suckas. Permanent decline in standard of living means you'll never travel internationally except maybe as a refugee, natural human response, I never wanted to anyway, not gonna read the book extolling the virtues and excitement of travel, etc.
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