Call for papers
Tourist guidebooks: where the vocabulary and the images of Cultural
Heritage meet

The conference focuses on the ways in which cultural heritage narrative,
vocabulary and imagery intertwine in tourist guidebooks in passages
dedicated to urban spaces, landscapes, architecture, figurative art and
crafts.

Which words and images are used to describe cultural heritage assets?
How are certain items selected through narratives and what is instead
left out? What is the role of the author(s) in selecting which cultural
assets to include in a guidebook and how to represent them
linguistically and figuratively? How do images and the lexical
repertoire stabilize to the point of becoming stereotypical? What is the
interplay of text and images? These are some of the questions that will
be explored.

On the one hand, the conference aims to investigate tourist guidebooks
as the locus where the real or virtual tourist experience is shaped and,
therefore, their key contribution to the creation of the image of the
destination and its heritage. Through description and narration,
guidebooks become intermediaries between the reader and the cultural
heritage of the destination. On the other hand, guidebooks should be
studied in terms of their relationship with the individual reader,
guiding them through a cultural space and focusing on the most
representative aspects of specific places and epochs. Moreover, their
influence is not limited to the time of travel; they also represent a
textual space capable of organizing the traveller's memories by bringing
together actual spaces and the tourist's subjective experience of them.
 

Who can participate
 
The research unit on the Vocabulary of Cultural Heritage is
interdisciplinary and multilingual in nature and investigates the
synergy between text, language and images. The conference aims at
bringing together scholars working in the fields of linguistics,
literature, geography, architecture, history, photography, and
communication. Travellers are also welcome to participate in the debate
Possible topics

- The vocabulary of cultural heritage in tourist guidebooks from
synchronic or diachronic perspectives
- Translated touirst guidebooks
- Different editions of tourist guidebooks
- The images of cultural heritage in tourist guidebooks in synchronic or
diachronic perspectives
- The imagery of cultural heritage
- The protagonists of tourist guidebooks: authors of texts and images
and readers
- Interactions with other descriptive genres: tourist guidebooks and
travel journals, tourist guidebooks and travel photography
- The study of tourist guidebooks at large: open issues

Deadline
Proposals should be submitted by 25 March 2015. Please send your
proposal to annick.farinaunifi.it

Abstracts should include the following information
Title:
Type of contribution (presentation/poster)
Author
Affiliation:
Address:
E-mail:


Organizing Committee
Annick Farina
Tiziana Serena
Elena Carpi
Gloria Cappelli
Carolina Flinz