Course code:
How can witnessing and reporting other worlds—whether a country, a village, a river, a mountain, or a back alley–make us more sensitive travelers, sharpen awareness of cultural biases, and empower place-based writing? This course highlights the allure, the dangers, uncertainties, risks, and joys of travel expressed in student writing. What words, images, foods, music, rituals, or other sources of inspiration spark curiosity and passions that make us want to go places?
Genre analysis, writing, and transdisciplinary research projects will deepen a sense of place as the course explores the rhetoric of travel and its transformative impacts. Students will experiment with, for instance, flash-essays, chronicles, interviews, journals, and field notes. Research projects will spotlight judicious selection of relevant sources, integration of data, and inclusion of multimodal elements. We will consider, too, the relation between travel writing and ethnography, between travel and gender, racial, religious, and ethnic components. Conveying impressions after short or extended excursions, students will recognize and develop which rhetorical strategies are appropriate for particular purposes, situations, audiences, discourse communities, and genres. Maps, films, infographics, letters, newspaper articles, guidebooks, blogs, Instagram posts, diaries, and logs constitute genres that may be examined and created. Students will further hone their craft in writing workshops, conversations, conferences, and presentations.
Short excerpts that reflect the intimate connection between travel and writing will be discussed, and the various rhetorical strategies employed by writers such as Matsuo Basho, Tu Fu, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Kingsley, James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Taras Grescoe, Bill Bryson, Annie Dillard, William Least Heat-Moon, Anthony Bourdain, Eileen Myles, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Hans M. Carlson. Whether an Inuit film for global audiences, or the map of a route across the North American continent by water, or notes in a diary from the Hindu Kush, for example, the course materials do more than simply record or narrate experiences and territories: they also report and shape the world and what it means to us. Evaluations will be based on class discussions, writing projects, and presentations.
Prerequisites:
None.
Always visit the Registrar's Office for the official course catalog and schedules.
