Walking in Virginia Woolf’s footsteps

Abstract

The past two decades have seen the rise of the walking tour as a tourist practice that stands in uneasy and contradictory relation to commodity culture. Focusing on the guided tour to Virginia Woolf’s London, this article examines what happens when we literally go back to Bloomsbury, walking the literary text as we write the urban one. Placing it in a tradition of walking as a cultural, critical and aesthetic practice, this article explores the literary walk as a mapping of the city, a reading of the streets that is also a performance of the text and that, as an embodied experiencing of urban space, is the corollary of the present obsession with heritage and cultural memory

Have you found what you’re looking for? Analysing tourist experiences of Wagner’s Bayreuth, ABBA’s Stockholm and U2’s Dublin

“…Moreover, music-related practices play an active role as building materials of identity, contributing to varying degrees of feeling immersed and absorbed. In the eyes of the tourist, visiting music-related places offers a 'lived and felt knowledge' (Plate, 2006) which lifts the experience of music out of the ordinary, in a way which is not possible through listening to a CD at home.…”

“…It wasn't that they had studied the libretto, memorized it and came prepared, you know. (David,63,American) The importance of walking has also been remarked on in relation to literary walking tours (Plate, 2006). Where Plate credits the geographical knowledge gained by walking to illuminate the text, David's quote shows how knowledge of the soundscape of a city can illuminate the music.…”

Stalking the count

“…After all, the literary walking tour has a completely different culturalhistorical background than the bus tour, and it also produces a different experience of the landscape (cf. Plate, 2006).…”

THE PAST IS MADE BY WALKING: Labor Activism and Historical Production in Postcolonial Guadeloupe

“…Walking has also become an important form of commemorative practice through the development of heritage walks, walking tours, and historic pilgrimages (see Markwell et al 2004; Plate 2006; Slavin 2003). During these forms of peripatetic commemoration, participants are encouraged to inhabit the world of the past, to follow in the footsteps of those that came before, to see the world as they saw it, and to “feel what they felt” thus generating experiential and multisensory forms of historical knowledge (see Handler and Gable 1997; Schwenkel 2006).…”