Travel Literature

授課教師：胡錦媛 (Chin-yuan Hu) 
Ph: 2939-3091 x 88112
 

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 We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time
--T. S. Eliot

"[H]ome" and the destinations of travel cease to be oppositional-there is always something alien about home and something familiar in the foreign locations. . . .
--K. R. Lawrence

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw 
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
--Wallace Stevens, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"

What is the relationship between travel and memory?  travel and desire, travel and signs that imprison us?  What happens when one travels from "center/west" to "periphery/east" or from "periphery/east" to "center/west"?  In what sense is Travel Narrative a genre that Roland Barthes recognized as more ideologically saturated than almost any other form of verbal representation outside propaganda proper?

This course will examine a variety of theoretical approaches to understanding the social, political, (post)colonial, cultural, economic and psychological experience of travel.  Our goal throughout will be twofold: to discuss travel narrative as another mode of displacement that allows writers to explore the nature of his/her own desire by means of a detour through otherness, and to see travel narrative as a way to reconceptualize and problematize the question of representation itself.

  課程要求：  
The course will be taught in a lecture/discussion format with a heavy emphasis on class participation.  One final paper.  No sit-down exam.
 

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Jean Baudrillard.  America.
Willa Cather.  The Professor*s House.
Joseph Conrad.  Heart of Darkness.
E. M. Forster.  A Passage to India.
Henry James.  Daisy Miller: A Study.
Herman Melville.  Clare.
C. L. de Secondat Montesquieu.  Lettres persanes.
Virginia Woolf.  The Vouage Out.
 

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Behdad, Ali.  Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution.
Blanton, Casey.  Travel Writing: The Self and the World.
Caesar, Terry.  Forgiving the Boundaries: Home as Abroad in American Travel Writing.  
Clifford, James.  "Traveling Cultures"
Culler, Jonathan.  "The Semiotics of Tourism"
De Certeau, Michel.  The Practice of Everyday Life.
Fender, Stephen.  Sea Changes: British emigration & American literature.
Franklin, Wayne.  Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: the Diligent Writers of Early America.
Kaplan, Caren.  Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement.
---.  "Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse"
Kristeva, Julia.  Strangers to Ourselves.
MacCannell, Dean.  The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class.
Mills, Sara.  Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women*s Travel Writing and Colonialism.
Mulvey, Christopher.  Transatlantic Manners: Social patterns in nineteenth-century Anglo-American travel literature.
Philip, Jim.  "Reading Travel Writing"
Poter, Dennis.  Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing.
Pratt, Mary Louise.  Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.
Probyn, Elspeth.  "Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local"
Spengemann, William C.  The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789-1900.
Stamelman, Richard.  "The Strangeness of the Other and the Otherness of the Stranger"
Stout, Janis P.  1983.  The Journey Narrative in American Literature: Patterns and Departures.
---.  1998.  Through the Window, Out the Door: Women*s Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion.
Stowe, William W.  Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.
Todorov, Tzvetan.  "Modern Travelers"
Wesley, Marilyn C.  Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women*s Travel in American Literature.
Wolff, Janet.  "The Female Stranger: Marginality and Modes of Writing"