From The Chronicle of Higher Education: ‘You’ve Read the Book, Now Take a Look!’:
Indeed, ownership of literary heritage is what’s at stake here. Literary tourism involves a cheap appropriation, an amateurish displacement of the text’s aesthetic sanctity, critics claim. Who shall be in charge of a writer’s reputation? Who are the audiences, the ideal readers – our students or the day-tripping proletariat? Literary tourism, an engagement with the text outside the scholar’s realms of influence (the classroom, the archive, the monograph), may threaten the professoriate as market forces infringe on our careful critical deliberations.
Tourist versions of literature become oversimplified as they are packaged for popular consumption. We may believe that our academic “interpretive community” (Stanley Fish’s phrase) uniquely appreciates the intellectual property, the legacy, the brand, of the writer, whose integrity is sullied by less devout caretakers.
