Travel criticism

DFW wrote creative non-fiction.

I'm not sure, but I have made observations against tourism from first hand experience. Travelling to another city/country and seeing all the tourist sights feels like disneyland. All of the tourists are walking around the capital and visiting the same areas. The locals don't like them. I prefer more off the beaten path and more adventurous. Why would I visit 50 different countries if all I'm going to do there is visit the capital and go to the beach? It's like the equivalent of saying "I've visited 'X'" when all you really have done is sat there on a layover flight.

pic related I found on Veeky Forums a while back, it might give some insight.

i agree. but sometimes you can go to a place and do all that stuff, then when you go back feel free to just blend in

The Art of Travel - Alain de Botton

I know he's a pseud but it's actually not a bad book.

Voltaire's Letters from England, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Boswell and Johnson's long essays on their tour through the Hebrides, Montaigne's Travel Journal may apply, if not exactly what your looking for. Goethe's Italian Journey most of all.

>(although personally I didn't like it)
This is where you say why

Letters from Russia by Astolphe de Custine
The travel diary of a philosopher, Hermann von Keyserling

Italian journey by Goethe would be very close to a philosophical inquiry, if not completely so. It is also very beautiful and worth a reading.

>Will surely make your thinkings go thinking

Come to think of it, there's a pretty long history of travel writing as great literature. What are some other favorites?

Dickens and wacky Mrs. Trollope in America. Come to think of it, what is De Tocqueville's Democracy in America but a giant philosophical Travelogue? Arthur Young's Travels are rather dry, but I liked them. Smollet's Travels too, and Baudrillard's America may be perfect.

Look into Jafar Jafari and Roberto Boullon

Emerson's English Traits is great reading--

Laurence Oliphant's books Journey to Katmandu and The Russian Shores of the Black Sea. Koenemann has a good series of travel books.

I've noticed a trend among younger people with a kind of fetishistic obsession with traveling to other countries (this is coming from the USA) but without much investment in actually absorbing the culture itself, more of just traveling for the sake of traveling. Not that there's anything wrong with seeing new places, but these memes that show like:
>picture of a bunch of luxury cars
>"your goals"
>picture of a filled out passport
>"my goals"

make it seem as if among a subset of younger people, conspicuous consumption is moving away from tangible goods to instead posting photos of the tourist trap you visited on Instagram but with the superior sheen of, "Ah, look at how cultured I am."

Read Veblen one Thanksgiving holiday, great time for that..
This mindlessness is not going away, I'm afraid.

dude everyone already knows about this phenomenon. giving (((opportunities))) to the lower classes was a huge mistake

Anyways OP read Henry James. Portrait of a Lady and American Scene are both good in this regard.

As is James' essay series on Paris. Thanks for putting that in mind, user. Actually own a copy. Good day for reading some of those.

traveling is a liberal pastime and the awakening of the philosophy is when you see that there is as much diversity in your neighborhood than in a country far away.

traveling to ''discover other cultures'' is literally the biggest cliché the plebs can do 9besides sex for transcendence and immanence)

Patrick Leigh Fermor?
Bruce Chatwin?
William Dalrymple?

Pretty much anything Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote was great.

yup