CLT 237 - Traveller's Tales

Michael Gorra

TTh 10:30-11:50

How do we describe the places we visit?  How do we define, comprehend, and order our experience of the foreign and the strange?  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 finish with some excerpts from medieval travellers: the great wanderers Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta; and John Mandeville, who may not have gone anywhere at all or even in fact existed.  We’ll match them up against Italo Calvino’s novel about Marco Polo, Invisible Cities, and some excerpts from Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions in order to think about the role of wonder, the exotic, and metaphor in the accounts we make of our journeys.

The remainder of the course will look at selected masterpieces of travel writing from the 18th century to the present.  Our reading list will stay in flux until the summer, but we will certainly reading Goethe’s Italian Journey and compare the Italian travels of Mark Twain and Henry James, a classic contrast that will tell us a lot about American attitudes towards Europe.  We will also read Flaubert’s account of his journey to Egypt—pyramids and brothels—and excerpts from Rebecca West’s massive account of her journey in the 1930s through what was then called Yugoslavia.   Other possibilities include Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa; Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Ottavio (Mexico); Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana (Afghanistan), Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee, Days and Nights in Calcutta, Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent runaway bestseller, Eat, Pray, Love.  We will finish with two books: this year’s edition of Best American Travel Writing, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts, one of my very favorite books, in which an 18-year old English boy sets out to walk across Europe in the winter of 1933.

Writing: a reading journal, to be kept in installments throughout the term, one 4-page paper, and a final, 12-15 pp. paper.  For this last assignment, students may, if they wish, write a travel narrative of their own, drawing on the terms we’ve developed in semester of reading and discussion as a way to structure, examine, and perhaps critique their own experience on the road.