Tracing Travel Talk in the Popular Magazine Text

Abstract

By tracing distinct travel discourses in travel articles in popular magazines this paper seeks to reveal how travel journalists, as mediators of travel messages, construct and inscribe particular positions for tourists, places and host communities through specific narratives, images and commonly used codes. Sightseeing, the idea of the privileged tourist and the aesthetic beauty of a place are dominant and recurring themes in the magazine texts examined. Sightseeing is presented as the dominant way to access and know tourism places, as opposed to knowledge involving other senses or types of social involvement. An assumed relationship of power between tourist and place privileges and legitimates the interests of the Western tourist in a narrative of the ‘independent and elite traveller’, rather than the ‘mass tourist’. ‘Place’ is prized while local inhabitants are diminished. Destinations are constructed as if they are tourists’ playgrounds, inscribed as beautiful and romantic to seduce the tourist, while locals are constructed as submissive and compliant, as they facilitate and sustain travel myths and fantasies.