BREAKING RANKS: Sadly, Travel Writing Is Dead from The Atlantic Wire by Erik Hayden

In new series of essays, Foreign Policy magazine declares travel writing dead. The easy culprit to blame is Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love, but the truth is that bestselling memoir was only the final "nail in the coffin" for a once-proud genre that has increasingly become "brainless," asserts Graeme Wood (also a contributing editor at The Atlantic). He explains that an ideal travel writer is "a sort of prophet" who has a "way of seeing the world through the eyes of one who has the time and luxury to look at it directly, rather than through the distortions of propagandists and wishful thinkers." That ideal has now been perhaps irreversibly tarnished by an "internet age frivolity" that threatens to combine "the worst of the traveler and the worst of the homebody":
The writer goes overseas but brings back news about a tedious inner crisis, leaving undisturbed any insights about the places visited. Eat, Pray, Love -- to take only the easiest target as an example -- is a whole memoir premised on the notion that even the most decadent, boring, and conventional kinds of travel somehow heal the soul and can turn a suburban ninny into a Herodotus or a Basho.
But why has travel writing devolved into such a "narcissistic" genre? As best as Wood can see, it's simple: "it is easier than ever to travel, and not at all easier to write well." Now that perspectives of "previously arcane hideaways" are now more numerous, and the accounts written quicker than ever, the views have regrettably become "far less exquisite."

If you don't particularly agree, Foreign Policy has posted a contrasting piece: Travel Writing Lives!

Hear, hear. I honestly couldn't get through it; it read like my kid sister's blog; just, instead of homework and the cool new game on Facebook, there were musings about being abroad, and getting into people's pants. But, really: who cares? I wasn't interested, but I can see the commercial value for something like this, and it's obvious that the thing could take off, given the right sort of marketing. And it obviously accomplished what its masters had in store for the text. Right on. Though: with the right kind of web marketing, the publishers probably could have made more in ad dollars had they released the book in pieces, through a blog. Again, with the right marketing team behind it to take it viral; instead of millions of readers you could have had a few hundred million readers; you know, since it was laid out so linearly, it would've been perfect for the blog format. Just download the free Kindle sample to check it out; it's one of those things that you just want to check out, because all of the kids at school are talking about it.