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Ivory Tower
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After I went through the semester's syllabus and briefly discussed the reading and writing expected of my students, I asked them what notions of travel writing they were bringing to class. The students began speaking about guidebooks and glossy magazines, and I quickly learned that few of my students had read much of the literature of travel -- no Graham Greene, no D.H. Lawrence and no Paul Theroux. That wasn't a big surprise and I could hardly blame them. For years, travel writing has been treated within English departments like the redheaded stepchild of literature, and rarely does a travel book garner a mention on a course syllabus.

But our discussion suddenly took another turn. One student raised her hand and said, "I'm sure the Graham Greene stuff is all very rich and interesting, but what pays better, that or the guidebook stuff?" The line of questioning continued from there: "How do you get magazines to assign you travel stories?" "Do magazines pay your expenses?" Above all: "How do you make a living as a travel writer?"

These types of questions aren't uncommon. At least weekly someone whom I've only just met wants to know how much money I make writing about travel. They're questions that would be clearly inappropriate to ask of anyone in almost any other profession, but mostly I forgive because people have always had a fascination with the travel writer's seemingly fantasy life of leisure.

There is, however, one group of people I don't forgive for asking these sorts of questions: my colleagues, the scholars in the fledgling academic field now called travel studies. These are the people who have a real stake in how travel writing is perceived and judged, and in how seriously it is taken. But the inability of many scholars to get beyond the banal issue of money -- as well as the unfortunate disdain some of them feel for actual travel books -- will chronically plague their sincere efforts to raise travel writing into the realm of serious academic study.

Like women's studies or gay and lesbian studies before it, travel studies is an interdisciplinary topic that pulls together scholars from literature, culture studies, history, anthropology, sociology and even departments of travel and tourism. Many credit Paul Fussell and his 1980 critical study, "Abroad," with making travel a compelling and respectable subject for literary scholarship. Fussell's book gave an obituary for travel writing and offered the work by British travelers between the wars as the last great heyday of the travel book.

Already there have been two major travel studies conferences in North America. The University of Minnesota hosted the first, Snapshots From Abroad, in 1997. The University of Pennsylvania hosted the second, Writing the Journey, in June 1999. Each was well attended by more than 100 scholars, and a look at the conference papers would indicate that we have a veritable boom of fresh academic inquiry. Some paper titles: "Class and Tourism in the 1820s: The American Tourist Guidebook"; "Narrating 'Other' Times and Spaces in a Postcolonial Age"; and "Exploring Liminality: The Spatial Politics of Travel and Gender Identity in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letter." Or my personal favorite: "V.S. Naipaul and the Lure of the Redneck."

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