Subject of “Cultural Studies”: The genre in various media and artistic circulation

The travelogue provokes many questions that have become more complex over its history since its status has evolved in several ways: the service support of the painter to the artwork, the tool for the illustration , diffusion and extension of knowledge on the other hand, then the original cultural product published recently in the book to the digital medium and to the performance arts (one turns to the information and other towards the arts and creation). Cultural object paralittératures and “Cultural Studies” at the intersection of graphic arts and anthropology, the history of pictorial art to better define the genre as a minor art, editorial and media related to the development of watercolor and travel training and the craze for tourism, exotic illustration and comics reportage, and recently, interest in the blog and audio-visual reportage. The ambivalence between art and documentary supports the difficulty to define the genre in the world of flow, circulation and mixing media, even “media confusion.”

The thesis is an attempt to define the genre “travel diary” album as a cross hybrid of documentary and book artist from an edition of the panorama (800 corpus securities) and research historical borrowings, crossings and interactions in the arts and sciences which are at the origin of mixing genres. The objectives of the research are essentially characterize the travelogue and propose typologies of research in book art book or tour guide. Interbreeding between reportage and artistic graphics, vision and exotic ethnography, it undergoes hybridization, a circulation of artistic and intermediality, semiological issues of contemporary travel book that seem conducive to communicative and educational development around the notion of intercultural mediation of otherness (pragmatic).

The thesis is therefore built according to a chronology into three parts, the genesis of the genre in its creation and editing its current versions, with examples of studies intended to identify the gender, but to circumscribe the limits also margins that define the hybridization process of the album. The history of pictorial art to better define the genre as a minor art, editorial and media related to the development of watercolor and travel training and the craze for tourism, exotic illustration and comics reportage and recent interest in the blog and audio-visual reportage. Historical research proved fruitful avenues to explore in graphic art at the service of science, modeled on the journal or book naturalist, and the mutation of travel book, intimate and personal the artist, to the status of a work of art.

From the main axis of the album and then the still image graphic art, defined as sketch or illustration, different notions are discussed in order to qualify for the dialectical image “graphic story” or drawn on the spot by two aspects of documentary objectivity and subjectivity of the artist’s book. Various opposing concepts were indeed discussed that seem to highlight the central concept of objectivity and subjectivity worldview: ethnography and the exotic, authentic and picturesque, reportage and artistic rendering graphic arts, documentary and book artist, turned to the other testimony and autobiography facing me.

Thought was given, on the one hand rendering iconographic-fragment, loan, instant, rough, unfinished, photomontage, drawing sketched, sketches, … and on the other hand, the message, and also ‘Other picturesque, exotic, authentic, reportage, documentary, ethnographic, educational, mythical, stereotypical … – and the artistic work in its entirety, which opens on three concepts:

– Work aesthetic and sensory perception, meaning, artistic vision, graphics rendering, emotions …

– Work mosaic juxtaposition, combination, superposition, collage, collage art, cut-up;

– Implement the hybrid fusion or mixture of arts, movement practices, circulation forms, deconstruction-reconstruction-deconstruction, transfer …

Mosaic art work and mestizos, the travelogue would report “graphic story” (or drawn), from paper to digital or media type “book” to the website, a mixture of genres, from sticking images, the blending of art and the meeting of two cultures, fields of study of semiotics. The search for a typology of such editorial reveals limits and generic characteristics since it is unclear from a hybridization, an artistic movement (artialité) and media (intermedia). The contemporary definition of travel diary is indeed complex because it highlights two notions of “intermediality” transpose traffic and media-and “intercultural” input-cultural, cultural hybridity, transcultural mediation-that make an object Communication attractive, particularly for training and education. Vision intercultural encounter between two cultures, that of the traveler and the object (native), complicates the definition of travel diary which oscillates between artistic look, exotic ethnography and extension elsewhere. Anthropological factors are polymorphic visions on the trip, they are three registers: the confrontation of imagination and myth to reality, the style of travel and portrait carnettiste traveler. Worldview and intercultural unfolds the exotic ethnography, according to the definitions of these two concepts. On the interpretation of travelogues and their images, it relates to the semiotics of the image that offers multiple avenues of research.

Pascale Argod

Enseignante PRCE à l'université de Bordeaux (INSPE d'Aquitaine) et chercheuse au sein de l'équipe du MICA (2246 - Médiation, information, communication, art) de l'université de Bordeaux Montaigne,
requalifiée en SIC (2010 - 2024 par le Conseil national des universités),
Docteur en sciences de l'information et de la communication.

More Posts