SOURCE: Porter, Dennis. “Writing the Orient: Barthes.” In Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing, pp. 287-304. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Porter analyzes Barthes's The Empire of Signs, suggesting that in writing the book Barthes consciously tried to go beyond “Orientalism” as a travel writer, and that Japan appealed to him as a “place where knowledge is uncoupled from power.”

The first part of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques proclaims “The End of Travel.” Yet, in spite of its author's opinions on the subject, it does not announce the end of travel writing. Though not without some discomfort, Lévi-Strauss himself goes on to tell the story of his travels around the world in a work that, like Bougainville's voyage, provoked its own supplement by a contemporary critical philosopher in the person of Jacques Derrida. The burden of the latter's critique is...