Placemaking in Literary Tourism: A Bakhtinian and Foucauldian Account

Rita Baleiro (ESGHT – University of the Algarve, CiTUR, Portugal)

Placemaking refers to the set of processes, practices, and interventions through which a physical location is invested with meaning, becoming a place rather than remaining an undifferentiated space (Tuan, [1977] 2001). In tourism studies, placemaking is commonly theorised as a continuum between organic, bottom-up processes and planned, top-down interventions (Lew, 2017). That typology classifies placemaking strategies but does not explain how meaning accrues to a site, or how a place comes to be counted as “literary”. This dictionary entry addresses that mechanism through Bakhtin and Foucault: the former accounts for the plural, unstable, continuously rewritten character of literary meaning at a site, the latter accounts for how that instability is nonetheless stabilised into a visitable, authenticated destination through discourse.

Bakhtin: Dialogism, novelisation and the chronotope

Dialogism holds that meaning is never generated by a single utterance in isolation but by encounter between utterances and contexts: a text “lives only by coming into contact with another text” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 162), a contact that illuminates the text in an ongoing dialogue with what precedes and what follows it. In this view, meaning is always relational and historically saturated ([1981] 2008, p. 282), rather than fixed at the moment of a text’s production.

Applied to place, this principle implies that a site’s meaning is constituted relationally, through the accumulation of texts, readings and re-readings that attach to it over time, rather than being a single founding act. This is consistent with Cresswell’s (2004) observation that place-meaning is unstable rather than static, and produced through ongoing practices such as reading, walking, quoting or photographing. A literary place is, in this sense, a palimpsest: literary texts, adaptations, authors’ biographies, commemorative plaques, tour guide scripts, local narratives, institutional framings and visitors’ own readings converge on the same site, and it is the dialogue among these voices – rather than any one of them alone – that produces and continually reshapes the place.

Bakhtin’s concept of novelisation extends this account. For Bakhtin, the novel is characteristically open, unfinished and permeable to other genres and voices ([1981] 2008, pp. 3–40); extended to place, novelisation implies that literary tourism sites are not fixed representations of a fixed literary heritage but destinations continuously rewritten through the interaction of texts, biographies, local memory, visitor practice, institutional heritage discourse and tourism narrative. On this view, a town associated with a writer is shaped not only by a house museum or a signposted trail, but equally by local storytelling, community archives, reading groups, festivals and the interpretations visitors themselves generate and circulate.

This plurality of voices is what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia: the coexistence, within a single site or utterance, of multiple, socially situated perspectives, each bearing traces of other discourses ([1981] 2008, p. 291). This apparent instability is not a deficiency but a generative condition: as visitors, local communities and fan networks introduce alternative interpretations, through social media storytelling, for instance, and resignify the site, expanding its semiotic horizon rather than eroding it.  In this perspective, literary tourism is a negotiated process in which a site’s identity is constituted by the interplay of these voices rather than fixed by any one authority. A visit to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth illustrates the point: the visitor encounters not only the building and the Brontë sisters’ texts, but also decades of adaptation, scholarly commentary, and prior visitors’ accounts, each adding to a dialogue that shapes the site’s meaning.

A second Bakhtinian concept relevant to literary placemaking is the chronotope: the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relations within a text (Bakhtin, [1981] 2008). Narrative time is never abstract but is condensed into and made visible through concrete space – a street, a house, a coastline – so that reading a text already implies a latent cartography. This explains why some texts generate visitable destinations, and others do not: only texts that embed traceable scenes and recognisable spatial references offer a chronotope that placemaking can externalise as a physical itinerary.

Foucault: discursive formation and heterotopia

Where Bakhtin accounts for the instability of meaning at a literary site, Foucault helps explain how a place nonetheless becomes stabilised as an authorised, visitable destination. In Foucault’s ([1969] 1972) view, a literary tourism destination emerges within a discursive formation: a system of rules authorising certain statements (énoncés, i.e., the basic units of discourse) and establishing a referential – a space of correlations within which literary representation and the objects associated with it can appear at all. This apparatus is sustained by an ensemble of resources: expert and community knowledge of what counts as heritage; material supports such as guidebooks, statues, museums and interpretive panels; governance structures, whether local, private or destination-management organisations; and spatial techniques such as cartography – which together stabilise a regime of veridiction: a shared sense of what is authentic, visitable and valuable, determining which places are treated as literary destinations and which are not.

Where an external referent exists – a writer’s documented house, a historically verifiable setting – this framework applies directly. But literary tourism often produces authenticity and value without such a check, through the internal juxtaposition of textual, imaginary, and material elements at a single site. Foucault’s concept of heterotopia accounts for this configuration: a real site that juxtaposes several otherwise incompatible spaces and times, functioning as a “mirror” of a “placeless place” or “virtual place” ([1967] 1986, p. 24). A house-museum built around a fictional character, or a literary-themed trail, is heterotopic in this sense: it holds together, in one physical location, the historical time of the writer’s biography, the fictional time of the narrated world, and the present time of the visitor’s own itinerary. Sherlock Holmes’ house at 221B Baker Street, London, illustrates heterotopic construction in the absence of a prior referent: no original 221B existed in Conan Doyle’s time, yet the site is sustained by institutional statements – a museum, a wall plaque, period-conservation curation – that establish the referential field first, within which the site’s visitability, and its truth-procedures, are then produced. The statement precedes and constitutes the referent, rather than the reverse.

Bakhtin and Foucault, read together, offer an account that neither provides alone. Bakhtin’s dialogism, novelisation and chronotope explain why a literary place is never a closed heritage object but a heteroglossic, continuously rewritten field, open to community storytelling, adaptation and visitor-generated meaning. Foucault’s discursive formations and heterotopia explain how, despite this instability, specific statements and spatial arrangements succeed in stabilising a place as an authorised, visitable, “authentic” destination – even where no prior literary heritage exists to anchor it. Placemaking in literary tourism is, on this reading, simultaneously a dialogic process of accruing meaning and a discursive process of authorising it.

This work is financed by national funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, IP., under the Project CiTURUID/04470/2025. Doi.org/10.54499/UID/04470/2025

How to cite this entry: Baleiro, R. (2026). Placemaking in literary tourism: a Bakhtinian and Foucauldian account. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University of the Algarve. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Bakhtin, M. ([1981] 2008). The dialogic imagination. Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin (7th ed.) (Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist). University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds; V. M. McGee, Trans.). University of Texas Press.

Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A short introduction. Blackwell Publishing.

Foucault, M. ([1967] 1986). Of other spaces (Trans. J. Miskowiec). Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27.

Foucault, M. ([1969] 1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (Trans. A.M.S. Smith). Pantheon Books.

Tuan, Y.-F. ([1977] 2001). Space and place: The perspective of experience (8th ed.). University of Minnesota Press.