About this product

Product Information

Strain explores the workings of representation, authenticity, kwledge, and experience within what the author terms the 'tourist gaze.' This way of kwing about peoples and places entails a process of selection-'the filtering eye'-and a search for authenticity...The discussion of how today's popular culture (often recycling colonial tropes) predisposes our perceptions is particularly well argued and documented. Recommended. -Choice Public Places, Private Journeys provides a detailed and nuanced account of immersive techlogies from the stereograph to virtual reality, conjoining these techlogies with tourism, anthropology, and mass entertainment. In identifying the common narrative strategies by which modernity defines itself against an exotic other, Public Places, Private Journeys is an exemplary and erudite model of interdisciplinary scholarship. -Chon A. Noriega, UCLA Department of Film, Television and Digital Media In this globally interconnected planet, we are increasingly able to access exotic locales without ever actually seeing these places firsthand. Instead, what we perceive to be fresh cultural experiences are actually secondhand moments, filtered through mediums such as television, film, the internet, CD-Roms, and various other media. Ellen Strain posits that the images in film and popular culture t only fill in the gaps of a person's firsthand-or rather, lack of firsthand-experience with other cultural situations, but also predisposes the tourist gaze to view particular locales in a predetermined way. How, she asks, are our perceptions of places and peoples created in the first place? Can a set of images-such as postcards-construct our vision of distant geographies? Are there culturally constructed strategies set up to mediate our cross-cultural perceptions of the exotic? Strain includes the works of Jules Verne, E. M. Forster, and Michael Crichton, as well as film, CD-Rom travel games, and virtual reality in her own authorial gaze. Public Places, Private Journeys is a unique postmodern exploration of how individuals see across cultural differences in an era of increasingly commercialized and globalized culture. Ellen Strain is an assistant professor of film and multimedia in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Techlogy.

Product Identifiers

PublisherRutgers University Press

ISBN-10081353187x

ISBN-139780813531878

eBay Product ID (ePID)95973121

Product Key Features

Number of Pages328 Pages

Publication NamePublic Places, Private Journeys : Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2003

SubjectCultural Studies

TypeTextbook

AuthorEllen Strain

Subject AreaBusiness & Economics, Literary Collections, Social Science

FormatTrade Paperback (Us), Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height1.1 in

Item Weight20 Oz

Item Length9.3 in

Item Width6.1 in

Height234mm

Width156mm

Weight462g

Additional Product Features

Date of Publication31/08/2003

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

Place of PublicationNew Brunswick, NJ

Spine17mm

GenreCultural Studies

Country of PublicationUnited States

Author BiographyEllen Strain is an educational technology consultant for Pearson Education and an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Content Note1, Black & White Illustrations