How do we describe the places we visit?  How do both guidebooks and the reports of earlier travelers structure the journeys we take ourselves?  Can we ever come to know the "real Italy," the "real India," or do those descriptions finally provide only metaphors for the self?  Our reading will fall into three units, the first of which begins with Patrick Leigh Fermor's  A Time of Gifts (1978), an account of a walk the then-teenaged writer took across Europe as the Nazis came to power in 1933.  This will be followed by brief excerpts from the literature of exploration, and from writers, like Defoe or Tocqueville, who conceive of their written voyage as largely reportorial in nature.  We'll look at guidebooks ranging from the old Baedeker's to Fodor's to the Lonely Planet series, and will read (both now and throughout the term) some recent scholarship on travel and tourism.  This introductory unit will end with a consideration of travel as metaphor, juxtaposing excerpts from Marco Polo with Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities.

The second part of the course will focus on visitors to Italy.  We'll read excerpts from Goethe's Italian Journey and talk about the Grand Tour, and taste the dry urbanity of Stendhal's several works on the country, before turning to a series of American travellers: Hawthorne, Twain, and Henry James from the 19th century; from the 20th Eleanor Clark's Rome and a Villa, along with essays by Mary McCarthy and Jane Kramer.

The third unit will concentrate on the Western traveler's construction of a non-Western other.  I expect to choose a month's worth of reading from among the following: Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh; Graham Green, Journey Without Maps; V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness; Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt; Julia Kristeva, Travels in West Africa.  I plan also to include a class or two on anthropological studies considered as travel narratives, probably either Geertz or Levi-Strauss; and this will loop us back to the reportorial work of the term's beginning.  We will finish the semester with Bruce Chatwin's meditation on what he suggests is humankind's nomadic instinct, The Songlines.

Writing: several brief exercises; two 4-page papers; a final 10-12 page paper for which students may, if they wish, draw on the semester's reading in writing a travel narrative of their own.