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This article has been published in: Ocula 12, Alibi: an Approach to the Semiotics of Travel

author: Massimo Leone (Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università di Torino (IT))

From Panoramic to Prosopopeial: Notes for a Semiotic of the Traveling Body

language: italian

abstract: The industry of tourism progressively strips the travel of one of its core anthopological and existential values, namely, being a laboratory where the traveller is allowed to experiment a temporary break up of his/her habits of sedentary belonging, shielded by the planned return home. In such perspective, the non-touristic travel is one of the best ways to test the limits of one's tolerance of cultural diversity and therefore to assess the identity of one's cultural and existential 'home'. Nonetheless, modern and contemporary travel texts usually celebrate the traveller's heroic ability to pass the limits of his/her tolerance. By arguing that the above emphasis springs from the colonial wish to tame and assimilate the world and its diversity, the article aims at subverting this logic and replacing the panoramic travel literature, dominated by the subjects' will to power, with the prosopopeial (that is, based on personification) one, which tells the stories of how the things of the world, the relics from centuries of civilisation, reject the traveller and his/her desire of domestication and conquer. As an example of such a subversion the article proposes a semiotic exploration of toilets, their variety and their 'cultural resistance'.

citation information: Massimo Leone, Dal panorama alla prosopopea: appunti per una semiotica del corpo viaggiante, "Ocula", vol.13, n.12, March 2012. DOI: 10.12977/ocula3

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