A Review of Steplings
Carrie Wasinger
Originally published in the October 2012 issue of Empirical
The tradition of the quest is a long and laurelled one. Joining narratives as disparate as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the image of the journey is ubiquitous in western culture. We find it in song (“The Long and Winding Road”), folk tale (“Little Red Riding Hood”), and film (Stand By Me), in fine art and in pop culture. The journey is one of our most symbolic ways of describing the evolution of character, so it’s not surprising that we turn to tropes of travel when we describe the formative moments of youth. Teens “go off ” to college; middle age brings us nostalgic visions of that magical road trip taken in our twenties.
