Travel Writing between Poetics and Politics

Abstract

We are in need of critical discussions exploring the tensions between travel writing as a textual genre and the medium that carries it. Indeed, we are witnessing a proliferation of mediations and mediatisations of travel writing across platforms and media, which further enriches and diversifies the poetics of the genre, urging to link it to the politics that lie behind the textualisation of travelling and writing as practices. This chapter presents three case studies in which the dynamics of mediati(sati)on play a crucial role: The travel book Crónica de viaje, by Jorge Carrión, which questions the generic features of travel writing by foregrounding the role of the Web as a meta-medium; two Instagram travel influencers and their different visualisations of what it means to be ‘on the road’; and 1 the Road, the first travelogue written by an Artificial Neural Network. Through these examples it is possible to draw broader reflections on the consubstantiality of genre and medium -poetics and politics -and point to possible future lines of research.