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ENGL-305-01 Narratives of Travel
Spring only
ENGL-305: Narratives of Travel
Dennis Todd / Spring ‘10
In this class, we will read some fictional and nonfictional accounts of travels and encounters with the exotic, the foreign, and the alien. We will begin the course by considering two narratives that incalculably influenced the Western concept of travel and encounter, Homer’s Odyssey and the Exodus Story. We will examine two nineteenth-century texts—Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—and then move to some representative twentieth-century works such as Forster’s Passage to India, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Pirsig’s Zen and the Heart of Motorcycle Maintenance. Throughout the course, we will examine a number of related concerns such as the construction of ideas of civilization and savagery and of slavery and freedom, and we will pay particular attention to the way the ‘Other’ is used to construct various kinds of identity. There will be several short writing assignments, two longer (5-7 page) papers and a final exam.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
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More information
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