In Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide, Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge—accomplished sociologist and published novelist—explore the fascinating interplay between literary and ethnographic writing. The exciting result is an intriguing experimental text that simultaneously delves into, reveals, simplifies, and complicates methodologies of writing and conveying experience. Refusing to force their unique voices into one integrated account, the authors—also spouses—explicate their stories in separate narratives and then discuss in transcribed "free-wheeling" conversations their different constructions of their travels together, travels simultaneously experienced, but recalled and related differently through the filters of distinct professional perceptions, life histories, and interiors. This boundary-crossing text will provide an ideal platform for students and professors interested in understanding and exploring the absorbing complexities and possibilities of ethnographic writing and creative nonfiction.
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Review
This exciting collaboration between Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge is a writing story that documents the changing relationship of two writers, scholars, and lovers as they interpret differently their travels. Blurring the genres between ethnography, travel writing, science writing, and memoir, this experiment works in unexpected ways to challenge our notions of gender, space and place, and the possibilities of relationship in a postmodern world. (Elizabeth St. Pierre )
A powerful and provocative exemplar of writing as inquiry, Travels with Ernest offers new and exciting possibilities for collaborative storytelling. There is no other book like it. (Ellis, Carolyn )
A powerful and provocative exemplar of writing as inquiry, Travels with Ernest offers new and exciting possibilities for collaborative storytelling. There is no other book like it. (Ellis, Carolyn )
About the Author
- ERNEST LOCKRIDGE (b. Nov. 28, 1938) graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Indiana University in 1960. A Rhodes Scholarship finalist he was Woodrow Wilson and Lewis-Farmington Fellow at Yale University where he earned "Honors" in all his graduate classes, was awarded an inaugural Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship (1962-3) and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in English within three years (1960-3). He was hired by Yale's Department of English (1963-71) and taught at Yale during the Golden Age when its English Department was internationally rated Number One. Lockridge was selected Fellow at The Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (1969-70). In May 1971, Yale's seven undergraduate literary prizes were won by his students, with work written under his supervision. Lockridge is author of three novels, one of which, Prince Elmo's Fire, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. HisTwentieth-Century Interpretations of The Great Gatsby (Prentice-Hall) went through 20 printings, remained in print for a quarter-century and continues to sell briskly over the Internet. All but one of his essays in literary criticism have been included in anthologies, and singled out for special praise. From 1971-91, Lockridge taught English at The Ohio State University where in 1976 he was promoted to Full Professor and in 1985 was awarded the University's premier award for teaching excellence, "The O.S.U. Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching." In 1991, he took "early retirement" after 28 years in full academic regalia, and has devoted himself to writing, jazz sax and clarinet, painting, family, and travel. Emeritus Professor of English, Ernest is a jazz musician and painter of award-winning paintings that have appeared in solo exhibits, galleries, and on the covers of books. He is father of three, stepfather of two, grandfather of eight.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not Just for Academics,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide (Ethnographic Alternatives) (Paperback)
I loved this book! Lockridge's humor pulled me in and Richardson's lyrical writing kept me reading. This is a book that cuts a broad swath through an academic couple's life. It took me to places I had never seen, made me think about my marriage in new ways and examine my career history with fresh eyes. Travels with Ernest is unique, compelling, and provocative. I highly recommend it.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This review was written by Bev Hogue for the OHIOANA QUARTERLY, Summer 2005, pp.224-5, quoted by permission,
By
This review is from: Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide (Ethnographic Alternatives) (Paperback)
TRAVELS WITH ERNEST could be called Travels with Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats, for its unique travel narratives are informed by a wide range of literary works. At one point Ernest Lockridge muses on his tendency to follow the footsteps of famous authors: "Myth and literature help order and direct your life, so you're not just traveling fecklessly about. They're like a map. We're able to map ourselves onto literature and onto myth." Lockridge and his wife, Laurel Richardson, travel with and without maps in TRAVELS WITH ERNEST, a hybrid volume combining travel narratives from two distinct perspectives. Lockridge and Richardson are both authors and emeritus professors at Ohio State University, Lockridge in English and creative writing and Richardson in sociology and cultural studies. For this book, they traveled to places as different as Death Valley, Beirut, and Ireland, each writing about the trip from his or her individual perspective; the book also includes transcripts of their conversations about the trips and the writing process. Ernest's essays, Laurel's essays, and the couple's conversations work together to triangulate in on exotic places and the process by which people come to know the world. Richardson describes their method: "Experiencing, writing, conversing, rewriting, conversing, writing. Although we agree on what we see, we have a different edge, a different take on experience." Most interesting are those forays that take the writers off the map entirely. Over and over again the map has been lost or left behind, but our intrepid explorers stumble on stubbornly, ending up lost or imperiled. Even while exploring familiar terrain, they discover hidden hazards. Lockridge, for instance, is haunted by memories of his father, novelist Ross Lockridge, who wrote RAINTREE COUNTY, a classic of mid-century Midwestern literature, and then committed suicide at the peak of his success. The terrain they travel is both exotic and familiar: a high-rise apartment building in Russia where they encounter cherished family members; a tiny apartment in Copenhagen that evokes memories of their student days; an ancient castle in Ireland that bears a family name. Wherever they travel--Beirut, Copenhagen, Shenandoah--they find their people, their history, themselves. And they also find Ohio. Lockridge describes Ireland's Midlands as "a dead ringer for Ohio on our best day of the year." Even while looking over Yeats's acclaimed Lake Isle of Innisfree, Lockridge finds an island paradise that looks familiar: "Thick with trees and shrubs it's the size of my back yard in Worthington, Ohio." Whatever maps its authors may follow, TRAVELS WITH ERNEST leads right back home.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Liz James Artscene's First Book Review , by permission,
This review is from: Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide (Ethnographic Alternatives) (Hardcover)
I recommend this book enthusiastically, for several reasons: First, amid the helter skelter of my own life, I treasure books I can enjoy in segments. Second, I enjoy books which I consider well written, and third, I relish non fiction books that read like imaginative prose but are actually non fiction works. TRAVELS WITH ERNEST meets each of these criteria. Savoring, dipping into this book, is a joy. TRAVELS WITH ERNEST enabled me, a compulsive stay-at-home, to see distant places. For example, as I write it's deep winter in Ohio, 2006, and I'm writing about Laurel and Ernest's ninth soujourn at St. Petersburg Beach, Florida in March 2002. Laurel, an accomplished poet, writes first, revealing her sharp yet lyrical talent for descriptive prose. It's her first trip since 9/11 and she breathes deeply "imagining millions of zaps of the happiness potions that live in the sea, some call them 'negative ions.'" She describes the GulfGate Condos as "color coordinated, swirls of turquoise, shrimp, and shells on the Wall Tex, chair covers, upholstery, pictures, dishes, towels, sheets. I sink into the comfort of the cliche." We're allowed to relish a visit to Evander Preston's jewelry store where Ernest buys Laurel "a pair of gold earrings, flat and smooth with wrinkled edges like the sea." In Ernest's account they revisit the Don Cesar Hotel which used to be a haunt of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Coincicentally, they want to see President George W. Bush and his motorcade drive up to the Don Cesar for a $25,000 a plate fundraiser. As two retired profesors they exchange hilarious wisecracks about the price! They also intend to have lunch in an ice cream parlor which was once named Zelda's, but they have to settle for the new Uncle Andy's. Ernest, who is an aficianado of--indeed, an expert on--F.Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY, describes the scene with accuracy and literary elan. As Laurel puts it, "Ernest can riff." He describes the Don Cesar as "our goal the flamingo pink mirage shimmering up ahead in the Florida heat, gigantic yet fragile looking, a Hansel and Gretel castle that might at any moment dissolve like sherbet into the Gulf of Mexico." Laurel asks Ernest whether he remembers George W. Bush at Yale. This sets Ernest off on a riotous yet highly informative ramble on those Yale days, 1963-71, when Ernest was assistant professor of English there. He recalls "classrooms full of good looking kids who'd rather discuss yachts than Yeats, most of them looking like, oh, clones of the Kingston Trio." Ernest writes skillfully, fearlessly about the then-new New Criticism and explains how and why N.C. eventually contaminated--yes, nearly murdered--the craft of literature, yea, education. Here is a marvelous expose, a must, for a throng of serious writers who have been suffering in silence and wondering for some time what really went wrong. In TRAVELS WITH ERNEST the authors break down societal barriers of alienation by sharing their conversations, thoughts, experiences. It's the actual story of two people who love each other and share their work and their lives. I treasure this book. It's kind of like reality TV, but the ideas are more exciting, and the language is platinum. REVIEWER: Elizabeth Ann James
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
So You'd Like to...
Look for Similar Items by Category
- Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors
- Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Memoirs
- Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Educators
- Books > History
- Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Criticism & Theory
- Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences
