https://scienceij.com 41 Denkovska, M., & Dimitrijovska-Jankulovska, A. (2023). The medium travel guide: some aspects of it’s strategies and goals, SCIENCE International journal, 2(1), 41-45. doi: 10.35120/sciencej020141d UDK: 338.483:087.6(497.7) 1. INTRODUCTION Perceptions of a different cultural environment are almost always burdened with the load of one’s own cultural authority. The process of perception and the organization and processing of information does not occur on a blank slate. It is much more infuenced by information categorization and stereotyping, which is not only affected by information from and about the natural living world, but also encompasses the social environment. A central mechanism in the creation of stereotypes exists in the general readiness of people for social categorization, for example, people divide them into members of their own or other groups. In contact with foreign cultures, this categorization and stereotyping plays a decisive role in many cases. The literary staging of foreignness must follow a narrative dramaturgy, which avoids the illusion of understanding, so that the foreign can be evoked as foreign at all. However, at the same time, the staging must be based on known patterns, so that it can present foreignness as culturally understandable. For this constellation of intercultural understanding between the other’s and one’s own, the literary writing stands paradigmatically, which is addressed “from abroad” to “home” and thus marks the intermediate space of cultural transmission as a distance. The travel writer has the potential to stage otherness without stereotyping it. For Francis Bacon, Renaissance travelers discovered a “new continent” of truth, based on experience and observation rather than on the authority of predecessors; and it was the travelogues that ensured the implementation of the new information that laid the foundations for the scientifc and philosophical revolutions of the seventeenth century. And as a stranger in a foreign land, the travel writer, since he is not bound by his roots to the singular components or to the one-sided tendencies of the local group, takes towards them a unique attitude of objectivity, which does not mean simple distancing and non-involvement, but a special formation from a distance and closeness, indifference and engagement. Nevertheless, in order to be objective, he must not be bound by any predefned obligations, which could prejudice his inclusion, his understanding, his assessment of the givens. The fact is that the preconditions, which will make the objective perception of the travel writer impossible, are numerous. The forms in which the travelogue describes the foreign are determined by the social status of the travelers and their involvement in the mentality of social groups, and essentially THE MEDIUM TRAVEL GUIDE: SOME ASPECTS OF IT’S STRATEGIES AND GOALS Milica Denkovska 1* , Anita Dimitrijovska-Jankulovska 1 1 PhD Candidate, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, “Blazhe Koneski” Faculty of Philology – Skopje E-mail: milica.denkovska@gmail.com, adimitrijovska@gmail.com Abstract: There is no extensive secondary literature on travel guides, despite their popularity among readers and their status as one of the best-selling genres in bookstores. The medium was more thoroughly researched in the disciplines of geography, tourism and folklore, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s, although different aspects and points were deepened depending on the discipline and thus a “compact feld of reliable knowledge and theories” could not be developed. (Wicke 2011: 22). Buhl (2020: 39) concludes that travel guide research is primarily concerned with the historical change in the genre from its emergence to the 20th century or attempts to create a typology of this broad, diverse genre. However, for the purpose of this research, of particular interest are the publications that refer to the ways in which the target countries are presented from an intercultural perspective; still, the number of these studies has remained insignifcant to this day. The most recent and very comprehensive study comes from Gesa Wicke (2011), who flls the research gap with her study of the staging of foreignness in tourist guides to Sicily. The subject of analysis based on available research for the medium travel guide will be the travel guide form Philine von Oppeln “Nordmazedonien. Mit Skopje, Ohridsee und allen Nationalparks” (2020). Keywords: travel guide, travelogue, tourism, alterity, North Macedonia Field: Humanities © 2023 by the authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). * Corresponding author: milica.denkovska@gmail.com