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This article has been published in: Ocula 12, Alibi: an Approach to the Semiotics of Travel

author: William Vastarella (Università di Bari (IT))

Erring is Human

language: italian

abstract: Travel and music are variations on a potential difference; some of Propp's (1928) categories can be applied to the analysis of a trip seen as a narrative.
The travel is a communication process: the sender is the starting place, the addressee is the place of arrival, the message is the traveller, the channel is the means of transportation, the code is the map, the context is the landscape or the territory (Jakobson 1956).
Erring is the essence of traveling, forgetting the end. Organized tourism, which offers the experience of moving without getting lost, and wandering, that is getting lost without moving, are the twin poles of the antinomy of travel with respect to the noise, the de-viation, to be kept in balance.
The bridge is the metaphor of travel, which is the metaphor of the metaphor (trans-porting): in the place where I arrive I find another aspect of the place I came from. Displacing of senses.
The landscape is the summary of the trip, and we travellers-readers give it every time a new sense, interpreting and assembling what has been written for us with what has not. We look from above at the route we wound, looking for the traces of ourselves, the balance of our being.

citation information: William Vastarella, Errare è umano, "Ocula", vol.13, n.12, March 2012. DOI: 10.12977/ocula7

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