Required Texts (1 credit):
Paul Fussell. Abroad. Oxford Univ Press. Paperback. ISBN: 0195030680
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels Oxford. ISBN: 0192833774
Mark Twain. Innocents Abroad or the New Pilgrims Progress. New American Library. ISBN: 0451525027
George Orwell. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harcourt Brace. ISBN: 0156767503
Additional Required Texts (2 credits--see Introduction):
Laurence Sterne. Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Oxford. ISBN: 0192816853
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. A Journal to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Penguin. ISBN: 014043221-3
Robert Byron. The Road to Oxiana. Oxford. ISBN: 0195030672
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade : A Duty Dance With Death. Dell. ISBN: 0440180295 .
Suggested Optional Texts:
The Norton Book of Travel. Paul Fussel (editor). W.W. Norton. ISBN: 0393024814.Travel Literature
Introduction
Paul Fussell's study of twentieth-century travel literature, Abroad, serves as the critical lense through which the primary sources should be read. Fussell discusses conventions of travel literature and demonstrates their fusion of sociology, biography, literary criticism and history. Students reading for 1 credit should read Abroad, Swift's travel fiction, Gulliver's Travels, Twain's Innocents Abroad, and Orwell's searing The Road to Wigan Pier.
If you choose to read for 2 credits, in addition to the 1-credit reading list, students should read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and one of the listed works by Sterne, Johnson & Boswell, or Byron. Sterne's work is an intelligent, if whimsical, description of an eighteenth-century jaunt through France and Italy. Johnson's and Boswell's companion journals chronicle their 103 day trip to the Highlands and northwestern islands of Scotland in 1773. Byron's masterpiece--the Ulysses of travel literature--is a complex recreation of Robert Byron's 1933 trip through what is now Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
When reading each work, Abroad, and any secondary materials, there are several aspects to which you should pay special note:
- the literary conventions most often used in travel literature
- the announced or presumed aims of each work
- similarities and differences between non-fiction and fiction travel literature
- ways that the culture of the author informs his views when traveling
- ways authors use unfamiliar aspects of "new" cultures to inform their readers
- Fussell's distinction between the lost art of travel and today's tourism
Main Medieval Drama Romantic Poetry Travel Literature
Stream of Consciousness Feminist Literary Theory
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