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CLT 237: Travelers' Tales
How do we describe the places we visit? How do both guidebooks and the reports of earlier travellers
structure the journeys we take ourselves? Can we ever come to know the “real italy,” the “real India,” or do those
descriptions provide only metaphors for the self. Our reading will begin with Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar,
which we will use to establish a template for the modern travel narrative-a book we will bounce off, refer to, and criticize
throughout the term. We will then read some critical essays on travel and travel writing, and look at a range of guidebooks
in order to clarify their, well, guiding assumptions. The opening unit of the course will then finish with Italo Calvino’s novel
about Marco Polo, Invisible Cities, which we will use to talk about the relation between metaphor and travel writing.
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The remainder of the course will look at selected masterpieces of travel writing from Goethe to Bruce Chatwin. We will read books about India and Italy and Iran, live in colonial Africa with Isak Dinesen and parse the complexities of Yugoslavia with Rebecca West; will visit churches with Henry James and brothels with Gustave Flaubert; get a husband-and-wife view of India from Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise; and learn, with Mark Twain, to look skeptically at everything. Writing: a reading journal, to be kept in installments throughout the term, one 4-page paper, and a final, 10-12 pp. Paper for which students may, if they wish, draw on the semester’s reading in constructing a travel narrative of their own.  |